


Synchronized Duplicity

by DemonQueen666



Category: Dollhouse, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Gen, Genderswap, Identity Issues, Original Character(s), Post Reichenbach, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-26
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-10-31 18:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 52,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/346992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DemonQueen666/pseuds/DemonQueen666
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In need of someplace to go once in hiding Sherlock Holmes ends up working for the Rossum Corporation. And then, as is usually the case, things get complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. To Begin With

**Author's Note:**

> Set post "The Reichenbach Fall". A crossover between the canons for Sherlock and Dollhouse, but focusing primarily on the characters for Sherlock with the premise of Dollhouse used for setting and plot device. Implied alternate continuity for Dollhouse and using mainly original characters at the beginning, though some canon characters will eventually feature in the plot.
> 
> Basically: this is mostly a fic for Sherlock, but it will be much easier to follow if you've at least seen Dollhouse too.
> 
> There will be more characters and tags added eventually, but for now I'm going to be adding them as I go in an attempt to keep some of the happenings of the story a surprise.
> 
> *
> 
>  _"Marley was dead: to begin with [...] There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate."_ \- Charles Dickens, _A Christmas Carol_

It was raining in Surrey that afternoon. Nothing too apocalyptic, just the usual light drizzle. The sort that could only hope to ruin one’s shoes, or maybe cause a cold if the victim wasn’t careful.

“Hang on,” Rodrigo started to say, “I’ve got an umbrella back at the car-”

She ignored him, heading resolutely towards the ditch, giving not the slightest sign she’d even heard. The luxury car crashed up to the front wings in the mud was the sole focus of her attention now, and much more interesting anyway. But just about anything was, compared to her babysitter.

Rodrigo swore. “Hey!” he shouted after her. “Ms. Holmes-!”

When that still failed to produce any result he was forced to follow her, cursing all the way. The wet earth clung to and stained his fancy dark suit. By the time he reached the bottom, and her, he was livid.

“No one said you had to come down here,” she remarked in a mutter, without looking up, knowing of course what he was thinking without him having to say it. Bent forward at an angle through the door she’d pried open, she rubbed gloved fingertips together, eyes narrowing as she contemplated a substance she’d gotten off of the steering wheel. “And, must you?”

Rodrigo was frowning angrily, but more fixated on his jacket than her. He brushed at the crumbs of dirt futilely. “What?”

“This ‘Ms. Holmes’ business,” she reminded him, terse and disapproving. “Really. What am I, your governess?”

His eyes bounced back up to her, then. “It’s a term of respect,” he said crustily.

“Please. You don’t respect me. It’s obvious.” There was a pause, and then, “Don’t talk,” she ordered the moment he was about to speak. “Your presence is stifling me enough as it is. The distraction of your wasted words is unnecessary.”

Rodrigo drew in his breath tightly in a manner that suggested he was about to explode. But he stayed quiet.

A minute ticked by. Then two.

She stood up, straightening, and adjusted the position of her coat, smoothing it.

“Well?” Rodrigo demanded, in the tone of the reluctantly but unambiguously curious. “Thoughts?”

“Done,” she determined.

Pulling up her collar, Amalthea Sherlock Holmes spun about on one foot and started smoothly marching back up the hill the way she had come.

There was a muffled splash as her handler (and really – how much she detested and resented the fact he even existed) scrambled after her.

“Done?” he echoed, incredulous. “You’ve barely even started!”

“And yet, here I am, finished,” she said flatly, glancing about in jaded impatience. “How remarkable. Or at least, it would be if it were anyone but me. Or if the case even remotely resembled something worth my time.”

“Worth your…” Rodrigo sputtered. With some extra exerted effort he managed to pull himself even with her so they were walking at the same place. “Rossum brought you on so you could find that stolen harddrive with their files on it – a matter of crucial security that could be worth millions and a lot of jobs,” he reminded her through clenched teeth. “All there is to go on is _that_ car, where the files were left by the executive last in possession of them. And you’re making it sound like you’ve already got the whole thing sorted!”

“I do.”

Having reached the road she stopped walking, turning about in a one hundred and eighty degree swivel so her and Rodrigo were face to face. She was tall for a woman; he was average for a man. Their noses practically touched. He balked and pulled himself up short.

“I have good news for our mutual employers,” she stated, simply.

“That you know who’s got the files?” he asked in disbelief.

“That they were never stolen to begin with,” she corrected. Rodrigo stared at her, and she drew the slightest of breaths before continuing.

“Our executive claims that the files went missing two days ago, at which point his car was stolen, but that is a complete lie. The car may be registered to him but it hasn’t been in his possession for quite some time – a matter of months, I’d say.”

Even as she was speaking in her mind’s eye she went back to when they’d interviewed the executive earlier that day. All the things she had noticed about him from the state of his clothes, the way he held himself, the glimpse she’d had of his living style from both the outside of his family home and the inside of his foyer where he’d spoken with them.

“The state of the car implies it’s been driven by someone much younger, someone more careless. The seat is in a different position than it would be for someone of the older man’s height and weight, and the position of the mirrors indicates an inexperienced driver. The floor is littered with take-away wrappers from greasy fast food, at least several weeks’ worth – I’d say, about four or five. The wheel was even smeared with chocolate. The _cheap_ kind.”

She huffed, sighing.

“No, the man we met would never treat the inside of his vehicle like that, especially one he paid so much money for. He’s too fastidious, too arrogant; the suit he was wearing, tailored and pressed, without so much as a seam or a line out of place. The gold plating on his wristwatch. The shine of his shoes. He gave the car to his son – about twenty-two years of age, I believe, with a history of juvenile delinquency and capriciousness that it took all his father’s influence to counter in order to successfully find enrollment for the boy in his alma mater.”

“He didn’t even mention _having_ a son,” Rodrigo protested, indignant. “And as to the rest-”

“ _Please_ ,” she interrupted him, poignantly disdainful. She didn’t even deign to backtrack and explain her conclusions. Instead she kept going forward with her narrative. “Our younger man, who was actually driving the car, crashed it here two days ago when he failed to pay attention to the curve in the road and drove it off into that ditch. He’s fine, by the way.”

“Who is?”

“The young man, the executive’s son. Haven’t you been listening to a word I said?” Sherlock demanded impatiently. “No doubt he limped off in embarrassment to sleep at a friend’s place, but not without calling his father to inform him he’d wrecked the car but was otherwise alright. The father wasn’t worried when we talked to him, and he would be if he thought his only son was missing or injured.”

“He sure seemed worried to _me._ Especially considering what we were talking about,” Rodrigo argued. “Matter of corporate security and everything.”

“He was faking. Badly. He’s not worried at all. He only made up the story about the missing drive being left in his car after the police already discovered the vehicle and brought the news to him. He then reported the ‘theft’ to Rossum, despite the fact that the data has actually been out of his possession for half a week before that.”

“There is no way you could possibly know _that_ ,” Rodrigo declared.

“There is, and I can, and I do.” Shaking her head, she reached into her pocket and pulled out her mobile, staring down at it with a distracted frown. “But I weary of having to explain every little thing to you all the time. It’s very tedious and infuriating.”

Her thumb was poised over the button to start a text message, out of habit.

But like all the times over the past several months she had started to do so, she was reminded that she had no one to text.

 _Everyone thinks you’re dead,_ a voice said inside her mind, in a momentarily haunting singsong that put a stiffness in her spine.

 _That is how you wanted it,_ a different mental voice reminded her, more neutrally. _How things have to be._

Well. Yes. But it wasn’t exactly the same as…

“Holmes,” Rodrigo said, sudden and loud, bringing her back to the present. “You were saying?”

She lifted her head to gaze at him, detached and vacant. “Hmm? Was I?” she asked, perfectly careless. Her _handler_ made an angry sound.

“If the harddrive and the files weren’t stolen, then what?” he pressed. “The executive sold them to a competitor? Corporate espionage?”

“Oh no, nothing nearly so sordid.” She snapped her phone shut and pocketed it, turning again away from the man. “He lost it. He’s just too embarrassed to admit it.”

Without looking back she could tell Rodrigo’s mouth was hanging open.

“The kind of man who would plunge his superiors into a panic worth potentially millions and let them think another company’s made off with their designs and information, rather than confess he simply brought something home from the office and can’t remember where he left it,” Sherlock mused. “It makes you wonder a bit at Rossum’s vetting process for their executives, doesn’t it?”

When the other still failed to say anything, she shrugged again. She started walking along the side of the road.

“Don’t worry, though. He just needs to ask his wife. She found the drive and put it somewhere safe for him – my guess is, the upper right drawer of his writing desk.”

“Where are you going? The van’s parked back the other way.”

“You go; inform those interested of the good news,” Sherlock replied. “I’ll catch a cab back into town.” She tugged at one glove and tightened her scarf. Already her mind was racing far, far away from there and such pointless little mysteries. There was an experiment she had been considering that she really wanted to start in on. “I’ll be back at my flat if you need-”

Suddenly Rodrigo was there, his hand gripping her upper arm none too tightly but still quite insistently. She turned to him with a disapproving frown, mouth opening.

“Would you like a treatment?” Rodrigo asked her with a stiff smile, before she could get any words out.

A flicker went through her, thoughts rippling. Her treatments were very important, she was reminded by yet another internal voice – though one that somehow, strangely, didn’t sound quite like her.

“Oh. All right. But can we make it fast?”

Arms folded and expression somewhat sulking, she followed a visibly smug Rodrigo as he escorted her back to the big black car.

She stared out the window the entire way there, fingers pressed together before her face as she thought. Not about Rossum, or the laughably simplistic problem they had deemed worthy of being ‘a case’ she should be called in on – no, anything but. Her mind was far too cluttered with their business enough as it was.

Faking her death had been the easy part. Where to go afterwards, that had been hard.

But luckily, somehow, Rossum had found her. Their rich and paranoid clients and employees could use the services of a consulting detective – and in exchange they kept her hidden, and looked after.

Too bad the whole arrangement, beneficial though it was, had her feeling like a pet on a leash, brought out once in a while to show off a trick

It’d been nearly a year. They’d brought her a grand total of three problems, none of which had taken her over twenty-four hours to solve. Sherlock was going out of her _mind_ with boredom.

She wasn’t quite sure why she hadn’t cut ties with Rossum yet, gone off in search of more industrious pursuits. Maybe it was simply that, somehow, she couldn’t quite think up a next move.

For once in her life she was having a hard time thinking forward – despite her best inclinations, she found herself continually looking back. At Baker Street. And Scotland Yard. And…

The people she had been willing to jump off a building to save.

“Here we are, then,” Rodrigo announced as they pulled up to the elevator in the subterranean parking lot. “ _Finally.”_ He pushed open the door and held it. “Off you go, Ms. Holmes.”

“It’s Amalthea, or Holmes, or Sherlock. None of this ‘Ms.’ business,” she reminded him pointlessly, as she climbed out the back of the car. She knew he wouldn’t listen to her request – he never did.

She kept telling Rossum she didn’t need a bodyguard, touching as the protective services of the man in the crisp suit they had following her every move were. It was a lot of things but especially belittling. The end sum of the response she had gotten, however, was a sweet smile and a polite but firm insistence that the services of _the_ Sherlock Holmes were worth enough to them that they really preferred to know she was safe at all times.

Not to mention _spied-on_. That went without saying.

A vapidly smiling female attendant was waiting for her inside the elevator, and Sherlock was handed a folded-up set of clothes. With the greatest possible begrudging she changed.

“I never understand why this is necessary.” She looked down at the yoga pants and soft camisole with a glower.

The attendant kept on smiling and didn’t dignify that with a response.

There were several other people sitting around waiting, Sherlock discovered in exasperated horror, when they reached the offices where she received her treatments. She counted five visible, and who knew how many more just out of sight.

Assistants ran about trying to hurry recipients in and out, and utterly failing. There were two people in charge of giving out the treatments and on a crowded day that simply wasn’t enough.

Not that Sherlock particularly liked either of them. Nicolas was a natty fellow that was just the right amount of intelligent that it’d made him notably lazy. Victoria was dedicated but overwrought trying to balance the act of bettering herself without completely leaving her working-class background behind.

“Do you have any idea how long the wait is going to be?” a woman asked, turning to the man next to her.

“One of them told me half an hour, at least,” he replied in a complaining sort of tone. Sherlock swept him up and down with keen searching eyes. _Lawyer. Criminal defense. Young but already making waves at his firm. Just won a big case, anxious to go out celebrating._

The first woman shifted in her seat, playing with the tight choker around her neck. “I hope it isn’t that long. I’ve got a client all tied up and waiting for me,” she remarked offhand. Sherlock glanced at her too.

“You aren’t really a dominatrix,” she concluded out loud, without pause. “You read a lot of trashy novels and like to fantasize, and sometimes you go out in public places wearing just a bit too much leather. You say things like _that_ to make yourself seem alluring, shocking, but you know most people would never ask. And if they did ask, you’d be mortified, because the fact is when it comes to sex and sensuality, you’re really quite restrained. And notably, _inexperienced_. What you really yearn for is a man capable and chivalrous to dominate you.”

The woman was turning bright pink from her cleavage all the way to her ears. The lawyer stared at her in taken-aback amusement.

Sherlock got to her feet abruptly. “This is inane. I’m not waiting. I’m going home. Someone can ring me when they actually _have_ an opening.”

Even as she was heading toward the door she felt a vague sense of anxiety, though its source was difficult to pinpoint. But she wasn’t supposed to just _leave_ , was she? She was supposed to get her treatment, she needed her treatment…

But then, she theoretically also ‘needed’ to not go days without sleeping, or more than twelve hours without moving or speaking or remembering to eat anything. Such petty annoyances of the body could be brushed off at times.

She could see no reason why her treatment couldn’t wait either. What was the worst that could possibly happen?

“ _Wait_ ,” a voice practically screamed from behind her.

Turning back, she beheld a harried-looking blonde gripping the doorframe leading to the other room with candy-colored fingernails. She stared at Sherlock with wide nervous eyes.

“I can give you your treatment now, Amalthea,” Victoria said in a breathless, shrill voice. She was trying very hard not to panic. Sherlock honestly didn’t know why, but she decided she didn’t care either. “Come on back.”

“Fine.” She marched over, ignoring the disbelieving grumbling of the others stuck waiting. “But make it quick. I’ve had enough time today wasted as it is.”

“Course. Just sit down in the chair, please, make yourself comfortable…”

Victoria ran to her console, fingers flying shakily across.

Sherlock tilted her head back and gazed at the ceiling, eyes half-lidded, tapping one fingertip on the armrest.

Almost a year, she thought – and she was so very sick of Rossum, and their tedium. It really was time she start making other plans. Maybe going backward wasn’t the answer, but taking a look back, perhaps, couldn’t hurt. It was a mixture of curiosity and what she was forced to name as sentiment.

There was a warming hum from the chair, as she started to sigh and think to herself, _I miss John…_

Everything went white.

*

Salome blinked her eyes slowly as the chair slid back upwards into position. As the tingling in her head faded she took in her surroundings.

She recognized this room. It was where she had her treatments.

She liked this room; she liked her treatments. Treatments helped her to be her best. It was important she be her best.

One of two people gave her treatments. Sometimes it was the lady, sometimes it was the man. Salome turned her head.

Today it was the lady. Her hands were still over the buttons as she looked back at Salome. She wasn’t smiling. She looked unhappy. Her forehead was all wrinkled and her mouth was in a stiff line.

It made something inside Salome uneasy, confused. She didn’t know why the lady was unhappy but she didn’t like it. People being unhappy always made her sad.

Why wasn’t the lady happy? Was it something she had done? Was she not her best?

“Did I fall asleep?” Salome asked softly.

The line of the lady’s mouth moved up a bit. “For a little while,” she said.

Salome nodded, movement slow and tentative. “Shall I go now?”

The lady let out a quick sigh and her face looked much less unhappy. The tension in Salome’s belly eased. “If you like,” the lady told her, sounding comforted as well.

Salome nodded again and she got up from the chair and left.

She walked down the stairs to where all the others were. There was a man in white waiting. He smiled at her, and waved his hand. She followed him dutifully as he led her away.

*

Nicholas Bickerton stood in the programmers’ office, arms folded as he absently watched the Actives moving about the House on the internal monitoring screens.

The rush of imprints waiting to be sorted had finally finished hours ago. Now it was late. Time for the toys to be put back into the crate for another day.

Behind thick-framed glasses his eyes tracked from one image to the next as the groups of Actives bedded down in their pods. Absentmindedly he counted each off in his head: Thomas, Uri, Esther, Lot…

His thoughts trailed a bit as he focused a little more on the last of this group of five. A tall female with black hair, long limbs and a slender but broad-shouldered frame.

Nicolas’ lower lip jutted out a bit as he watched her musingly, reminded of something. A peaceable expression was on her face like all the others as she lay down and made herself comfortable.

The door to the office swung open, and he looked back over his shoulder. His co-programmer, Victoria Havisham, strode in breathlessly.

“I’ve been looking for you all over,” she announced.

“Were you?” Nicholas remarked. He turned to face her more directly. “Good, because I remembered something I wanted to ask you. What were you doing with Salome this afternoon? The Holmes imprint is my job.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Victoria said, insistently. “You need to tweak it.”

“What?” Nicholas moved his hands to his hips, making a careless scoffing sound. “The three engagements she’s had have been flawless. The imprint has performed to all expectations– _exceeded_ them, if possible, in fact.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

Nicolas stared at her, shaking his head in wordless request she elaborate. Victoria folded her arms tightly.

“I think she’s too clever.” Nicolas laughed, and she scowled at him. “I’m serious! There’s deductive reasoning to spare in there; you could strip it back a bit and the clients wouldn’t be none the wiser.”

“Order from on high,” he gestured loftily, as he stepped back in an indolent movement, “was that they wanted an imprint capable of doing all the stuff this Sherlock Holmes fellow allegedly could. And since a gracious chain of events meant we were granted access to the original brain to scan, after it had an unfortunate meeting with the cement-”

“She tried to _leave_ ,” Victoria cut him off brusquely, stressing. “Today. Got fed up with waiting; that’s why I had to grab her and take over her wipe right quick.” She held her thumb and pointer finger a millimeter apart. “She was _this close_ to walking out of the building.”

Nicolas’ mouth worked noiselessly for a moment, dumbfounded. But swiftly he recovered again with aplomb.

“Security would’ve stopped her before she got anywhere,” he reminded his coworker gruffly, in a tone to suggest he thought _that_ was that.

Victoria however, was aggravatingly far from reassured.

“Oh! And what if they hadn’t?” she demanded. “What if somehow she slipped past them? She might’ve gone back to her _nonexistent_ flat. Or, what if she wound up with access to the internet and for some reason tried looking herself up?” She glared at Nicolas, wide-eyed. “Think that might be an awkward story, then?”

He scoffed again. “That’s never gonna happen. You’re worrying about nothing, now.”

Nicolas started to walk off. He rounded a desk of computer terminals. Victoria trailed him, heels clicking persistently.

“The protocol framework is supposed to be absolute. ‘Treatment’ is _supposed_ to be the magic word, to them; say it and they’ll stop doing anything!” She waved her hands. “They’re not supposed to come in for one and then get _bored_ and decide to walk away. It’s just not supposed to happen.”

“It’s an anomaly. Put it in the report, and her handler will keep a close eye on her.” He shrugged, reaching for where he’d left his mug sitting. “Not that he doesn’t already.”

“You can’t think it’d hurt anything to switch it up a bit. Make her more docile, or maybe increase her sense of loyalty to Rossum… _something_ to make sure she isn’t about to go off-grid.”

Nicolas set his mug back with a loud clink, truly annoyed now. “The imprint is fine! I’m not about to go changing it just because you want to _fuss_.” He whirled around to shoot her with a look. “The load’s split up like it is for a reason, remember. I’ll focus on my work, and you try to stay focused on yours. Okay?”

Victoria didn’t say anything. But she continued gazing at him with a tight look of disapproval.

Nicolas got fed up with the silence and gave in with a sigh. “What?”

“Just thinking about something my dad told me, once,” she responded. “About how you should never try fooling someone you know is smarter than you.”

He rolled his eyes in exasperation. Walking closer, he rested his hands on her shoulders.

“Vicki. She’s not _smarter_ than us. She’s not even _real_. She’s an altered photocopy, that when it’s not in use is kept stored on a bloody microchip wedge. I think it’s safe to say we’ve got the upper hand, yeah?”

Satisfied with his conclusion Nicolas left the room, Victoria left staring with silent affront in the wake of his patronizing gesture.

She was alone for several seconds before her eyes drifted over to where the other programmer’s had been before, focused on the closed feed of the Actives.

Salome slumbered inside her pod.

Victoria bit her lower lip as she considered her, unsure.


	2. And Then She Woke Up

Actives weren’t supposed to dream. They had no memories, no recorded experience with sufficient ‘meat’ for their subconscious to draw upon and replay. On top of that, the way their internal processes were framed was designed against such things.

But the Actives didn’t know that. They didn’t know what they were or were not supposed to be capable of.

And sometimes Salome dreamed.

It wasn’t very much. Just the same thing, over and over. She was sitting somewhere. It was dark. Her fingers were wrapped around a round thing and one foot pressed against the floor over and over.

She was trying to make something _go_. But it wasn’t working.

And then there was a bright light coming from the side, so fast, too fast. Scary and loud and big. She screamed. There was a crash.

She was afraid, and there was supposed to be pain, but it never got that far. After the crash everything went dark.

It was frightening and unsettling while her eyes were closed. While she was asleep. But when she woke up, the dream faded away, replaced by the mellow euphoria that was every day of her methodical, content existence.

She didn’t exactly _forget_ , but she didn’t entirely _remember_ either. An Active’s mind was not built to dwell.

And if she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to dream, then she had no way of knowing anything was wrong.

The cover to her pod opened. She woke up. She climbed out with a passive smile and walked down the soft carpeted hallway with all the others.

“Good morning, Salome.”

“Good morning,” she said to the nice lady in white.

“Are you ready for breakfast?”

“Yes. That would be nice.”

Breakfast was thin waffles with strawberries. Salome liked strawberries. She sat with Judas and Rebecca while they ate.

After breakfast she did her exercises. Then she took a shower.

She went to go paint, but she had only just sat down when the man in the dark suit came to her.

Salome smiled up at the man. He was important to her. She trusted him.

“It’s time for a treatment,” he told Salome, reaching for her.

Salome’s smile grew brighter. She liked her treatments. They helped her to be her best.

She took the man’s hand and let him lead her away.

*

Vicki kept her eye on the diagnostics screen as the imprinting process finished. The surge of information finished and within seconds the chair was powering down.

“Pretty simple assignment, this,” Mendez was saying as he glanced over the tablet he’d been handed. “Posing as a groupie at a fancy restaurant opening.”

“Enjoy the free champagne,” Vicki quipped, distracted.

She licked her lips as she thought, briefly tasting her own cherry chapstick. Fingers grasped above the white fabric of her lab coat sleeve with nails painted a bright shade of sky blue that was just starting to chip a bit at the edges.

Salome climbed out of the chair, fingers running through her dark tresses as she gave an expert yet careless toss.

“Please tell me I’ve time to go shopping before the luncheon, love. Because this look simply won’t do,” she demanded of her handler in the breezy voice of a woman used to having both the looks and money to get her every need fulfilled.

With a smirk, Mendez gestured diplomatically towards the door. “Right this way, miss.”

Salome made a disaffected sound at him, a sort of sniff, and sauntered out, hips swaying and legs moving in a striding gait.

The handler glanced back at the programmer in abashed amusement. “Can you believe they _pay_ us for things like this?”

He moved to follow after his Active. Vicki turned about to face his direction, suddenly and pressingly curious.

“Hey. Wait a moment,” she called after him. He froze in the doorframe, frowning at her. Vicki cleared her throat. “You’ve been with this Salome the whole time she’s been around, haven’t you, Mr. Mendez? The only regular handler she’s got, yeah?”

“I’ve been with this House since the _day_ it started,” Mendez expanded, eyebrows going up a bit at her inquiry. “I was with the first Salome, the one before this. And yeah, she’s been my girl every day for the past three years. Why?”

“She’s a good Active,” Vicki observed, “Salome?”

“She’s in decently high demand.”

“Well, yeah, but I mean…she behaves. Her engagements always go the way they’re supposed to. She keeps her clients satisfied.”

Mendez grinned a little at the unfortunate double entendre. “In the case of some, she keeps them _very_ satisfied.”

“And she never glitches. Like some of the Actives’ been known to, on occasion – memory awareness, bursts of heightened cognition.” Vicki waved a file, ignoring his remark. “I’ve had a look through her reports. There’s no record of any of that with her.”

“It’s never happened,” Mendez affirmed, frowning again. “Like you say, she’s a well-behaved girl, with well-behaved programming.”

Vicki rested her back on the edge of the nearest desk, drawing in a breath as she got to what she was really interested in.

“What about the Sherlock Holmes imprint?”

The change to the handler’s expression was instantaneous. “ _That_ one. God, don’t even get me started. I’ve been paired with Dolls that’ve been everything from nymphomaniacs to bounty hunters, and none of them have come even close to giving me _half_ the trouble.” He snorted. “To think, I used to consider ‘ _insufferable_ genius’ to be a cute phrase.”

Vicki nodded. “But it’s not Salome? The acting up. It doesn’t come from her.”

“Nah – it’s from whoever _you_ people put in her head,” Mendez said conclusively. “I’m just thankful she hasn’t been brought out to play too many times so far. Look, are we done here? I’ve got to catch up. If Jezebel and her handler are ready before we are I’m never gonna hear the end of it.”

“Right, yeah. Off you go then.” Vicki headed back towards her terminal, sitting down at the computer. “I’ve got five new imprints alone I need to get started on anyway. But thanks for the chat.”

The handler left not giving so much as a second glance back.

Vicki started to open up the file on one of the engagements she was tasked with creating an imprint for, but she stopped. For a moment she stared at the space in front of her, thinking.

Then she closed the window and opened up her internet browser instead. 

Fingernails tapping on the keys and lips puckered nervously, pensive, she typed out _“johnwatsonblog.co.uk”._

*

Nicolas peered down at the floor of the Dollhouse from one of the overlooking walkways.

Not that he’d never seen it before; in fact he was quite familiar with it, considering he worked here every single day of his life. But the view remained nice no matter how much time passed.

He took in the pale but warm exterior, the minimalist artwork, the Actives sitting on the low couches around the pond or performing tai chi exercises.

“Have to admit, I’ve never really gotten the whole _Zen_ thing,” he noted. “But it makes for a nice decorating schema.”

The head of the Dollhouse came over to stand beside him. She favored him with a thin, faintly amused smile from her elegantly painted lips.

“Yes, well. It can be as much an aesthetic choice as it is a philosophic one.” Resting her hands lightly on the rails she looked the same direction as Nicolas. “I must admit I got the idea from the design in one of our sister Houses over in America. Really quite lovely.” Offhand she told him, “I was offered the position as Head of several prominent Houses over there originally, you know.”

“Really?” Nicolas commented, genuinely interested. The Head was a mysterious woman who kept very well to herself. He really didn’t know much about her, nor did he suspect did anyone else. “I’d no idea.”

“Yes. Ultimately I decided I’d rather stick closer to home, with one of the less affluent facilities, than seek the easy glamor of coming into an already high-demand branch.”

She moved her hands from the railing and turned, walking alongside down the path so she could still keep the floor in her line of sight as she moved.

Nicolas quickly moved to follow her.

“Well – maybe we didn’t start out with the traffic like New York or Los Angeles did,” he said, eagerly, “but we’re catching up. The number of engagements has almost tripled from what we were doing this time last year. And this isn’t even a holiday season!”

“Yes,” the Head agreed, sweetly. She paused in her steps, turning to face her programmer. “We have had quite the increase in both clientele and demand. I’m not surprised you’ve noticed, Dr. Bickerton – I’m certain everyone who works here has.”

Nicolas smiled as genuinely as he could manage, and offered brightly, “No doubt thanks to your bang-up job in leadership.”

The Head ignored his brownnosing compliment. Her expression grew sterner. “Of course, increased demand means increased responsibility, and I expect everyone to be capable of keeping up if they want to continue working here.”

“Is that why we’ve been through five different Heads of Security since you took over?” Nicolas had to ask in a slightly feeble joking tone.

Her mouth twitched but no amusement reached her eyes. She remained deadly serious. “Yes. It is true I have high standards for those who assist me in keeping my House running, and so far I’ve yet to meet a man or woman that successfully meets all them to my satisfaction.” She lowered her head a moment, averting her gaze. “But I didn’t request this meeting to talk about my other employees’ job performance, Dr. Bickerton. I requested it to talk about yours.”

The grin rapidly slid off of Nicolas’ face. “Oh? I, er – that is to say-”

“As of right now, we have two head programmers,” she continued, smooth. “The standard for most Houses is one. The sudden influx we’ve had of many more requests for engagements has necessitated keeping you both on, but I will be quite frank and say that it was always my intention to eventually cut one of you loose.”

“But, we were both hired at the same time,” Nicolas managed, feeling his throat growing dry.

She folded her arms and nodded.

“My idea. You and Dr. Havisham come from different backgrounds, both of which are considered acceptable prerequisites for being trained on the imprinting equipment. I wanted to see how your different approaches might benefit the process.”

He couldn’t help making a face. Victoria had studied neurobiology; his background was clinical psychology. ‘Different approaches’ didn’t even begin to cover the half of it. Nicolas and his coworker had never gone on well from day one – surely _that_ was no secret, either.

Before he could say anything though, the Head began speaking once more in a crisp, insistent manner.

“I want to make it very clear that at this point, I do not have a preferred candidate for who I will be keeping on,” she emphasized. “I only want to make you aware of what’s going on in my thoughts, so that you understand what an impact even the slightest mistake can make.”

Nicolas swallowed, but he was able to smile, feeling at least fractionally relieved. He nodded.

“Ah. Right.”

“And I will be having this conversation with Dr. Havisham as well, so that you will be on the same page.”

“Of course.”

Sure, both of them were able to keep up their half of the London Dollhouse’s imprint load just fine, and there’d been no complaints so far, but if it was going to be a challenge between the two of them Nicolas had a fair amount of certainty Victoria just wouldn’t be able to hack it. She obsessed over an adherence to protocol too much – she fretted and wasted valuable time.

And Nicolas wasn’t the least bit worried about the caliber of _his_ work. His imprints were flawless, past suspect.

Having reassured himself he smiled at his employer with much more confidence.

“We’ll see what happens, then. Anything else I can do for you, Ms. DeWitt?”

She returned his smile graciously.

“No, thank you, Dr. Bickerton. You may return to work.”

 *

“Did I fall asleep?” Salome asked, sitting up in the chair.

“For a little while.”

"Shall I go now?”

“If you like.”

She left the room where she had her treatments. She went swimming. She had a massage.

After getting dressed again she was walking across the floor when the man in the dark suit was there. Salome blinked at him dutifully.

“No rest for the wicked, dear,” he said to her. Salome didn’t understand so she stayed quiet. “Time for another treatment.”

“Oh.” She brightened at that. “Okay. I enjoy getting treatments.”

“I know you do. Come along.”

The man in the dark suit walked just behind her as they went up the stairs. She could see the man that gave the treatments waiting for them. Salome waved at him with a smile.

“Hello, again,” the man said. He had thick glasses and showed his teeth when he smiled. “In the chair, if you please.” Glancing over at the man in dark suit, he added, breezily, “Hope we’re not tiring you out too much with all this high demand.”

The man in the dark suit chuckled. Salome didn’t know what was funny.

She looked down at her toes. Demurely, she offered, “I try to be my best.”

“Of course you do.” The man in the dark suit gave her a quick pat on the head.

Salome smiled again, happy.

*

“I don’t particularly see what the problem is here, Adelle.”

She adjusted her weight ever so slightly where she stood in front of her desk so that she was leaning on it in a manner that didn’t appear entirely graceless. One hand rested on the edge to help brace herself.

She narrowed her eyes at Clive Ambrose. “We have no shortage of investigative skill sets already on file,” she stated, sharp. “Private detectives, bodyguards, members of law enforcement. If it’s an Active capable of solving mysteries and riddles a client wants, I can have one made for them in a matter of hours. There’s no need to keep coming back to this.”

Ambrose spread his hands. “The client is asking _specifically_ for Sherlock Holmes. And the customer is always right, right?”

Adelle shifted with a look of as much dry condescension as she dared. “We both know that isn’t remotely true,” she declared. “And continually bringing in an imprint of such caliber to hunt down missing wallets and chase after adulterous spouses is the equivalent of using a professional cricket bat to bludgeon mosquitoes.” She arched a brow, emanating clear disapproval. “It’s excessive to say the least. Not much of a stretch to claim, wasteful.”

Ambrose gave a dismissive chuckle. “We’re catering to the wealthy, Adelle. The elite. The demanding and the high-maintenance. If it was a matter of getting someone who could serve their desires just fine, or even the best in the world, then why would they even bother coming to us?”

He strutted towards her desk, making a careless pointing gesture that indicated not so much Adelle herself and her office as the whole enterprise that was the Dollhouse. The whole picture.

“No; they come to us, because we can give them _exactly_ what they want, when they want it.” Ambrose snapped his fingers and then made a fist. “And they want it, they ask for it, because they _can_. There’s no other reason. And there doesn’t need to be. That’s the way this whole thing works.”

Adelle straightened up and moved so she was the other side of her desk, as if trying to put more distance between the two of them as unobtrusively as possible.

“It is not the way I prefer to work,” she pronounced.

Ambrose’s smug expression faded and the look he gave her was much darker as his brow furrowed.

“I don’t need to remind you what your job is, do I?” he asked, blunt. “I realize you probably feel like you’ve got the home field advantage here on this side of the pond, and don’t mistake me: we’re incredibly grateful to you for turning the London branch from a secondhand escort service to the five-star gem it’s become, but I hope you haven’t somehow forgotten who you work for.”

“No,” Adelle assured him, though in as terse a manner as possible. “I have not.”

“All right.” He nodded, giving a scoffing laugh. “Then why the reluctance?”

Adelle hesitated for a brief moment before responding, considering her words. “The original source of the imprint was a generous gift, from a very influential friend to our organization,” she reminded him delicately. “I would think it discourteous for that gift to be…taken for granted.”

Ambrose gave an empty smile.

“Your objection is noted. But, until further notice, if the client asks for Sherlock Holmes, then you’ll send them Sherlock Holmes. It’s as simple as that.” He smoothed his tie. “Now, are we done here?”

Adelle nodded tightly, barely moving her chin. She was the closest she dared come to visibly scowling under the circumstances.

“I suppose that we are.”

*

Sherlock opened her eyes. The first thing she was aware of was Dr. Nicolas Bickerton, the physician usually in charge of giving her treatments. The second was the presence of her Rossum-appointed handler, Rodrigo Mendez.

Bickerton gave a toothy, obnoxious grin. “Welcome back! How are you feeling?”

“Where are my clothes?” she demanded, completely ignoring him.

As Bickerton shuffled over to hand off a pile of folded garments, her scarf and gloves placed neatly on the very top, Rodrigo made a huffing sound and rolled his eyes.

“I like you a lot better when you’re spouting off nonsense about being your best, you know.”

“No idea what you’re talking about. Hardly need to _proclaim_ I’m the best – it’s evident for itself after all,” she muttered indifferently. “I need to change. Meet me downstairs.”

“Oh, yes _ma’am_ ,” Rodrigo snapped in a voice dripping with sarcasm.

With the two men to her back she walked out the door to the office, and almost collided with Victoria Havisham on her way.

“Oh. Sorry,” Sherlock apologized in the most offhand, detached way possible.

“No. S’alright. I wasn’t really looking where I was going…” Dr. Havisham’s voice trailed off as her gaze drifted to the clothes Sherlock was holding, then suddenly snapped back to focus on her face with far more recognition than had been there beforehand. “It’s _you,_ again? Amy. I wasn’t expecting-”

“Do _not_ call me Amy,” Sherlock corrected her bluntly.

“Right, sorry. Amalthea, I mean.” Dr. Havisham licked her lips in what it hadn’t taken Sherlock very long to identify as a nervous habit of hers. “Just wasn’t thinking we’d see you again here so soon, is all.”

“That makes two of us,” Sherlock told her. “Well. Maybe someday we’ll cross paths under much more pleasant circumstances. One of the employees will steal something, or kill somebody.” She sighed. “There’s always hope. Afternoon.”

“…Yeah, bye,” Dr. Havisham called after as Sherlock was already walking away.

Her sharp ears caught the beginning of an intense conversation as the other woman went back inside the lab and confronted Bickerton.

( _“Are you bloody kidding me? What, you just trying to rub my nose in it now?”_

_“Hey, I’m not the one who places the orders, it’s got nothing to do with me!”)_

She tuned it out. Workplace row; very typical, very boring. Absolutely nothing she needed or cared to know.

The last adjustment she made after changing her clothes was to tighten up her scarf, which she was finishing as she reached the basement and found Rodrigo holding the back door to the car open for her with the greatest begrudging.

“Alright, we might as well get on with it,” she declared as she climbed in, settled herself and the vehicle started to move. “Tell me the details of this case that alleges to be worth the need of summoning my services.”

Rodrigo told her the particulars. Wealthy client, very private, very paranoid, with a beachfront estate where a dead man had been discovered, naked, sprawled on the beach that very morning. Cause of death looked to be drowning but how he’d gotten there, who killed him and why were all still unknown.

“As flattering as this all is, has Rossum’s client not heard of the police?” Sherlock inquired testily.

“I did mention the part where he’s paranoid, right?” Rodrigo responded. “He doesn’t want a police investigation tramping about his private property, possibly causing his name to appear the papers. But he doesn’t want the murder going unsolved either, just in case it somehow comes back to him.”

“And so I’ve been contracted to find an answer that can be best swept under the rug, splendid.” Sherlock sank back into the seat of the car, sighing. “Oh well – at least there’s a dead body. _Finally_ , something I can sink my teeth into!”

The interior of the car was silent as she looked out the window and thought and Rodrigo stared at her with a mildly discomfited look on his face.

Finally, she faced her handler again to fix him in a sharp inquisitive gaze. “Tell me about the client.”

“He’s not the dead man, and doesn’t even know him,” Rodrigo protested.

“Yes, yes; I had gathered all that. I don’t care. Tell me everything you know.”

Rodrigo’s brow wrinkled. “He’s in finances.”

Sherlock waved her hand in a furious, impatient gesture he should go on. It was like pulling teeth, but by the time they arrived at their destination she’d managed to pry every detail out of Rodrigo’s thick head.

The body was still on the beach where it’d been found, untouched. Several members of the private security team employed by the owner of the estate had set up a parameter around it.

Sherlock stood over the corpse, head tilted and eyes narrowed as she took it in.

“We can cover him up a bit for you, miss,” one of the security men offered. “I mean – below the waist. If you’d rather not be bothered by his particulars.”

“Don’t be insipid,” was Sherlock’s only reply, gaze never leaving her target.

After another moment she crouched down, weight balanced on the balls of her feet and arms draped over her knees as she got a closer look. With one gloved hand she brushed at the dead man’s hair then carefully turned his head for an examination of both sides. With her other hand she delicately pressed in the chest, testing to see what it felt like.

“Hmm,” she concluded after she felt she’d taken everything in. “Definitely drowning.”

“I told you that already,” Rodrigo couldn’t resist complaining.

“Yes, well, it’s quite obvious. Even the likes of you couldn’t have missed it.” She stood back up in one fluid movement, her sense of balance unfaltering.

“No signs of foul play.” She turned to face Rodrigo with an unmasked look of annoyance and disdain. “Natural causes. This was an _accident_.”

“Well how could he have gotten here?”

“This place isn’t precisely Buckingham Palace; there are holes in the security. Most notably, out there.”

She pointed directly at the water. Rodrigo laughed in bewildered disbelief.

“He _swam_ in?”

“Technically the current carried him, after he was already deceased. But yes.”

“But doesn’t this mean someone at least rolled the body?” a member of the security team broke in. “I mean, the man’s got no swimming trousers on.”

“He swam in the nude. The condition of his skin should make that fairly obvious. I believe we’re done here.”

She was all the way back to the street where the waiting car was parked before Rodrigo managed to catch up.

“It can’t possibly be that simple,” he yelled at her, turning red in the face. Whether from her quick dismissal of the scene or her not deigning to wait for his escort, she wasn’t entirely sure.

“Why?” she demanded in reply. “Most people are ordinary, simple. They live ordinary and simple lives. They die ordinary and simple deaths.” She moved in to glower at him, eyes narrowing. “There’s no need to go making the next great caper out of everything, just because one is bored to tears.”

“That’s really it, then?” Rodrigo finally repeated. “Naked night swimmer, drowned, accidentally washed up on the part of the shore belonging to one of the most paranoid men in London? Nothing else to it?”

“Not to the death, certainly. Though the owner of the estate certainly has his reasons for paranoia.” She shifted away, idly observing the skyline. “If I had murdered my mistress a period of no less than seven months and no more than a year ago, and hidden the body somewhere so perfectly _obvious_ , I’d be wary of letting the police anywhere near my home too.”

There was a long pause as Rodrigo gaped at her. Probably waiting for her to say she was joking.

She wasn’t.

“Excuse me,” Rodrigo inevitably spluttered, going pale. “I need to make a phone call.”

He ran off, trying to get out of the earshot of both her and the private security team as he no doubt frantically phoned his Rossum employers for information on how, given the circumstances, he should _possibly_ proceed next.

Sherlock didn’t care. She kept her eyes on the buildings, doing a geographical calculation in her head.

No doubt it hadn’t occurred to Rodrigo, or anyone else, but from a technical, longitudinal perspective…this was as physically close as she’d been to Westminster for a very long time.

And even though she wasn’t exactly making a concrete plan, she was counting off in her thoughts: what would be the best way to get from here to there, whether the tube or a cab would be best for each leg of the journey, how long precisely it would take.

A faint smile formed on her face.

Rossum could spare her the rest of the day. It wasn’t as if they had absolute control over where she decided to go, after all. Oh, they’d be angry, but what she did care? They were her _employers_ ; it wasn’t like they fully _owned_ her.

She hurried to the end of the street and with a slight running start was able to hop the fence, disappearing on the other side.

Still smiling Sherlock ducked her head and pulled up the collar of her coat.

She wouldn’t actually talk to anyone, she planned to herself. She wouldn’t let anyone see her.

She just wanted to get a glimpse at Baker Street. See how John was doing, if she could find him – and she was sure that she could. That was all. She only wanted to assure to herself everything was all right.

The decisions in the life of Sherlock Holmes were, ultimately, no one’s business but her own.


	3. Exercises in Trust

The sensations of being back in London, of travelling about at her own pace unescorted, surrounded her and sunk in through her skin. Every sight and sound offered a faint source of fascination and amusement like Christmas bauble.

Sherlock settled into her seat on the underground, unable to completely fight off the smile that had painted itself across her expression the moment she’d gotten away. She took in a breath and turned her head.

She smelled perfume and cologne and unwashed clothes and stale beer and cheap food and extinguished cigarettes, heard voices and feet shuffling and coughing and cell phone buttons clicking and music echoing tinny through tiny ear-bud style headphones;  she was assaulted by things to observe and loving every second of it.

She needed this. She really did. It wasn’t _just_ that the assignments Rossum kept trying to bring to her were laughable. Her life had become so static, caged up in a barely-furnished flat and hustled about in private cars from one scene to the next. Never any time to stop and take things in, to give her brilliant intellect a chance to be let out to play a little or absorb any useful new data.

It was all so _dull._ Sometimes she felt as if her brain was attempting to beat itself to a pulp against the inside of her cranium, out of sheer misery. She was, in all honesty, not certain how she hadn’t gone mad at some point during the first few months.

The deal she’d made was starting to feel like one contracted with the allegorical Devil.

Of course she of all people understood, if she was to remain “dead” in the eyes of the public that demanded keeping her head down. Not just out of safety but for the necessity of what she was, what she did – the curse of _fame_ , after all, had ultimately ruined her. Had made everything impossible, and perilous.

No; if the handful few of those she cared about were to remain protected, the world could not know that she still breathed.

But the _good_ people she was in contact with at Rossum were downright paranoid. They never wanted her to go anywhere, save where they brought her. She was to always travel with an escort. They “requested” she refrain from communicating with the outside world by any means, lest she somehow be traceable or give herself away.

 

 _Please_. Like they didn’t know who they were dealing with.

 

She understood the dire need to be careful. But she was more than capable of doing a little reconnaissance without letting herself be recognized.

 

It didn’t matter if no one had ever listened when she claimed this. Today she intended to prove her point.

At her stop she got off, weaving her way swiftly but unobtrusively through the crowd, head down and a pair of sunglasses she kept stashed in her pocket covering her eyes.

The ability of the average human to identify faces, at a glance, from a distance, was far less than was commonly presumed. Particularly with regard to a face that wasn’t known in person but only through the newspapers.

Nobody stopped her. Nobody even glanced at her twice.

She somehow was restrained from letting herself look visibly smug.

Leaving the shadows and confines of the tube system behind, she climbed up onto the sidewalk and started looking around for a good corner to hail a cab.

By all accounts, she’d be within the vicinity of Baker Street in twenty minutes.

*

The atmosphere inside of Adelle DeWitt’s office was one of a contained hurricane of panic.

The head of security was screaming, red in the face. Nicolas was doing his best not to cower. Victoria visibly _was_ , her hands shaking where she kept them firmly down by her side.

And Ms. DeWitt herself?

She stood beside her desk, one hand resting on her hip just above her tailored pencil skirt, the fingers of the other pressing lightly against the smooth wooden surface nearby. Her expression was perfectly blank, her eyes keen and alert.

And anyone who knew DeWitt, had worked for her, knew this meant they should be afraid.

Her fury was an icy one. The colder and quieter she got, the situation became all the more dangerous.

“Gentlemen, _please_ ,” she ordered in a firm tone that cut through the din. Silence immediately fell, her security man swallowing back his words, and all three wide-eyed faces turned to look at her. “This is no time for such dramatics.”

Her words were clipped with the disapproving, threatening tone that normally only terrifying schoolmarms could manage.

“There is a serious issue at hand here, and it needs to be resolved. And that will not happen if you are all too busy squabbling at one another.” As if anyone had been saying _anything_ besides her hot-blooded security head.

Victoria’s mouth opened, and the sound was audible when she nervously changed her mind and closed it.

Ms. DeWitt’s eyes flickered to her, briefly, before she tilted her head like a queen to observe the security man instead. “Mr. MacPherson?”

He nodded at the acknowledgement, and swallowed again to get some of the rage out of his throat before he continued speaking, in what passed for a normal tone.

“Think we’ve already heard a summation of what’s going on here,” he assessed. “When Mendez had his back turned, Salome wandered off. Now we don’t know where she is, and she’s carrying an imprint that basically has a bloody roadmap of London in her head.”

“Not to mention a fairly accurate timetable of the tube system, and a thorough working of all the back alleys,” Nicolas put in, tugging his earlobe.

This time the others stared at _him_.

“This a joke to you, Bickerton?” MacPherson snapped.

“No, no! It’s just – if I may.” He held up both his hands, palms out in a gesture a mix of placating and ‘wait a moment’. He laughed weakly. “Thing here is, I think we’re all getting over-worked up about this.”

 _“What?”_ Victoria demanded, giving him a look like he’d just announced he was the Emperor of Pants.

Nicolas ignored her. “I mean, if you just take a moment to really stop and think about it, the situation isn’t all that bad.”

“It’s a bloody disaster, is what it is!” MacPherson declared, scowling at him. “We have a _rogue Active_ on our hands!”

“A ‘rogue Active’ would be if Salome had…gone off-mission entirely, or attacked someone inside the House.” He grimaced as he referenced what he knew they were all thinking of: “What happened in California – _that’s_ a rogue Active. What happened here is an imprint’s persona wasn’t sufficiently restrained by its parameters, and it wandered off. Okay?” He dared to meet Ms. DeWitt’s gaze. “It’s not _good_ , don’t get me wrong, but it’s happened before. At basically every Dollhouse branch on the globe.”

Ms. DeWitt was quiet at first, considering. “That still doesn’t do anything for telling us where she is,” she remarked finally, crossing her arms.

“She’s still tagged,” Nicolas exclaimed, trying not to sound like he was actively wondering if he was the only one who remembered this. “Her handler can keep looking for her, and I can bring the GPS online to help him track her down. Easy.”

“I can’t believe you’re acting like this is nothing,” Victoria told him, still staring at him in a way that was challenging, angry, and questioning his sanity. “This isn’t a supermodel running away from a bad date, or a pickpocket looking for another score. The person that Salome currently has inside of her head makes this a very different, very serious-”

“If anything, the imprint she’s got right now means we’ve _less_ things to worry about,” Nicolas interrupted her, dismissive.

“How so?” Ms. DeWitt asked, since that remark left Victoria flabbergasted, and MacPherson had gone off into the corner to yell at somebody else on his phone.

Nicolas had to laugh a bit, at the luck of it all. “She thinks she’s _Sherlock Holmes!_ She thinks she’s dead! I mean; she thinks everybody _else_ thinks she’s dead, and she’s laying low.” He shook his head. “She’s not going to go up to people and try to talk to them, tell them who she is. That’d be against the whole point.”

He waved a hand. “If anything, she’s the _least_ dangerous imprint that could be let out there, as far as security and secrecy to the Dollhouse goes.”

“Let’s not put it _that_ far,” Ms. DeWitt responded, crisp. “But as to the rest, Dr. Bickerton, I suppose you do make a fair point.” MacPherson hung up his phone loudly and she turned to look at him. “Anything?”

“Trail’s gone cold,” he told her in a growl. “Told Mendez to keep looking, and I’m sending out more of the team to back him up.” He spun on Nicolas. “How fast can you have that GPS thing up and running?”

“Matter of minutes.” Nicolas pointed over his shoulder. “I just need to get to my computer-”

“Then do it,” Ms. DeWitt commanded. “And fast.” She moved to her chair, smoothing her skirt before she sat. “Regardless of how great or not the severity of the situation may be, the longer Salome’s whereabouts are unaccounted for, the worse things look for us.” She turned her head to fix both men with a steely gaze. “My House is well-run, gentlemen. I do not like being made look bad,” she said tersely. “I expect you both to do your jobs in this.”

Nicolas flashed back to their earlier conversation, and tried not to let a dry lump form in his throat.

“Of course, ma’am. Right away.” He hurried toward the exit, MacPherson tight on his heels, not caring or even really noticing that Victoria was hanging behind.

 _It’s not the end of the world_ , Nicolas thought. People just needed to stop acting like it was.

*

221B Baker Street was empty.

Sherlock could tell it from a glance where she stood across the street, with her head tilted up, observing. Still she stayed there perhaps twenty, thirty seconds longer than she should, so she could confirm it.

The position of the curtains. The lack of movement from within. The cobwebs that had built up visibly even from the outside.

From the glimpse she could get of the furniture it looked like their things hadn’t been moved out either.

 _Their_ things. Joint ownership. Hers and John’s.

But John wasn’t here anymore, and she couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or a bad one. Hopefully it meant he wasn’t dwelling, that he had moved on with his life. It’s what she wanted, after all, when she realized she was going to have to leave and in such an abrupt way. Why she’d been willing to lie; willing to call _herself_ a liar, and a fraud.

Of course, John not being there could’ve just as easily meant he was too upset by what’d happened to come anywhere near the place.

Mrs. Hudson, sentimental warm-hearted old soul that she was, had been unable to bring herself to have the place cleaned out and find new renters. Sherlock supposed that wasn’t surprising, once she thought about it.

It was strange, and touching, to think she’d made enough of an impact on them that she’d be so obviously still remembered.

But despite the intent of this little jaunt, there was no time to stand about and reminisce.

She had to keep moving. Rossum’s security force may’ve been comprised entirely of morons, Rodrigo being head-in-chief, but they would be no doubt looking for her. And on the off-chance they got lucky it wouldn’t do for her to make things easy for them.

She’d a destination in mind but no real timetable. A swift foot in traveling about was always mandatory, but there was no actual _rush_.

She took a cab across town and then walked back in the same direction she came. She ducked inside a crowded pub and slipped out through the back door. She took the elevator up to the top of one building, climbed down the fire escape, and then travelled by hopping rooftops for several blocks.

Eventually she was within sight of the clinic where John had worked, last she knew.

She tried not to think about the possibility he may have left, or stopped working altogether if his psychological insecurities had come back, or moved to another part of London. Or even out of the city. If he had, then there was nothing left to go on – she wouldn’t be able to find him.

Oh, practically speaking, she _could_ ; she could find anybody if she’d the time. But that was the problem. Time. Right now what was operating on was borrowed.

She could test Rossum’s patience for a day. Any more than that jeopardized the arrangement, and as fed-up with it as she was, it was too risky to let go of without other options materializing.

From a few blocks away she stood in an alley with her back to the wall, able to observe the front of the clinic without physically sticking her head out of her hiding place. She contemplated, forming her next move.

Going straight inside was no good. There’d be no room to maneuver, to spy. If John was there, there was no doubt he’d see her, and probably cause a scene.

She looked at the area around the clinic instead. She counted the restaurants, the cafes, the pubs, and formulated the odds on each that they would appeal to someone of John’s sensibilities – that he’d find them suitable to visit after work, for a drink to relax, or for dinner if he didn’t feel like going home yet.

Eventually, she picked her mark.

She checked the time. Forty-seven minutes until John’s shift ended. Assuming he hadn’t changed hours, which she doubted.

Half an hour she managed to kill off walking around in circles. After that, she returned to the pub she’d chosen.

Ordering a pint, she made herself comfortable in a booth at one end of the facility. She’d picked it carefully: first figuring out where John would sit, then finding where she’d be able to see him more or less clearly without him seeing her.

She didn’t check the time. She could feel the seconds, minutes, counting away inside her head. Less than five until his shift ended, another five to get to the pub, maybe ten if he dawdled or got held up talking to someone…

Usually on stakeouts she was unflappable calm. But this time – she could feel her pulse rising ever so slightly. There was a clamminess building on her palms that’d nothing to do with the glass wrapped inside her hands.

She was _nervous._ She was never nervous. But then, these were very unique circumstances.

This whole business was exceedingly foolish, she well knew. When someone pretended to be dead the last thing they were supposed to do was stick around. Let alone put themselves so physically close to someone they once knew that they could easily be spotted.

But she couldn’t help it. After a lifetime of being immune to sentiment, it seemed some had gotten under her skin so badly as to make her willing to betray reason.

It was _John_. She had to see him. Just once. Just one last time.

 _Please,_ Sherlock found herself thinking as she waited, _don’t let me be wrong._

She was never wrong. Except those times it had counted the most.

Letting out her breath in a quiet sigh, she closed her eyes for only a moment. And the instant she did, the little bell over the pub’s door jingled as somebody came in.

“Evening, Doc! Be the usual for you, then?”

“Ah, yeah.” From across the smoke-filled and humming room came John’s voice, familiar and offhand and unassuming. Sherlock went completely still. “Thanks.”

She heard him come in and sit down. She could isolate his footsteps beneath the other sounds. He wasn’t using a cane – his limp hadn’t returned, after all. At first she didn’t bother opening her eyes.

She just sat where she was, and smiled.

The minutes ticked by, and she stayed put and watched John eat his dinner and nurse his beer. She ordered another pint, then another – sipping at them enough so it wouldn’t look suspicious, while she discreetly poured a little out onto the floor, or the side of the booth, or into some rags she had stuffed in one pocket of her coat.

John looked tired, but not unwell. He had the same amount of appetite she’d always known him to. It was clear he didn’t particularly consider the pub keep or the waitresses his friends, but he made conversation with them anyway when they spoke to him.

She took in the little cues. He wasn’t dating. He was satisfied with work. He still wasn’t getting on with his sister.

He was doing well, or well enough. She could leave satisfied, and not worry, or think of him anymore.

Or at least she could try.

She settled her tab and did her best to slip quietly out while John’s back was to the door.

It would’ve worked, had she been paying better attention to her surroundings, instead of using up every last bit of her observational powers to quietly assess John. If she hadn’t underestimated the presence and determination of stubborn drunks.

“Where y’think you’re going, sweetheart?” a bearded man slurred at her. He staggered to his feet and grabbed her sleeve, the two mates he’d been drinking with following with equally intoxicated chuckles. “Been sitting here all night, putting ‘em away…looks to me like your bloke’s stood you up.”

He grinned, showing stained teeth, and had to squint to make out her face. “You wanna be _my_ date, then?”

“Not particularly,” Sherlock said. She looked him up and down, pulling a face as he swayed too close and she got a whiff of his breath and body odor. “Actually, not at _all_.”

“Aw, c’mon. Just give me a chance to change your mind.”

“No thanks.” She pulled her arm free but now they were standing in position to block her from the exit.

“Let us buy you another drink!”

A stern voice called out from behind Sherlock, distressingly familiar at this particular junction: “ _Hey._ I think it’s clear the lady wants you gents to leave her alone.”

“You stay out of this!” one of the drunks yelled at John.

Sherlock didn’t have to turn around to know John was already getting off his barstool.

She had to get out of there, before it was too late. Simply fighting her way through was an option, but one bound to draw copious attention. Not a suitable strategy.

Quickly she faced the closest man.

“Factory worker, judging by the state of your hands and shoes. Started working there when you were old enough, been there ever since, intend to stay there until the day you die or you’ve saved up enough to retire. Not a very ambitious fellow,” she noted, words tumbling out of her mouth one after the other in a manic pace. “But you like your job and you work hard. Put in long hours. So when you do get a night off, a chance to spend time with your friends, you drink too much. You can’t really hold your liquor. I can tell by the rate at which you’re blinking, the way you’ve already started to slur your words.”

The man in question gaped at her in slow bemusement, eyes dropping to his shoes and then staring, baffled, at his outstretched palms.

“You didn’t drive here; good for you. That means you’ll have to take a cab. You live four, maybe five blocks from here.” Sherlock tilted her head, doing the calculation. “Average traveling speed for a cab, this time of the week, this part of town – you’ll be passed out before you’re halfway there. So, obviously we’ll be seeing no action from _you_ tonight.”

Her eyes bounced to the man closest to the door. “Now, you on the other hand, are far more sober. However you _are_ married. Two to five years, I’d wager. And, before you say anything, I know you’re separated. _But_ you haven’t gone through with the divorce yet. And you’re not going to either: because you’re hoping for a reconciliation. Oh, you’ve gone to great trouble to hide it, possibly to preserve your sense of pride, or maybe because your friends never liked her.”

The sheepish way his eyes slid towards the other two without thinking confirmed this.

Sherlock continued, “But the truth is you’re not over her, and you want her back. I can tell from the way you had to practically paw the ring off your own finger, leaving behind those marks, and also the fact that you’re wearing the coat she gave you as a gift last Christmas.”

The man started to nod, face crumpling up like he might actually let loose a sob. Sherlock ignored him. She at last looked back at the third man, the one who’d confronted her first.

“Now, let’s see. _You_ ,” she said, still keeping up the same rapid pace of speech. Pressing fingers together she placed her hands just before the lower half of her face as she thought aloud.

“You’ve just started a new job down by the docks within the last month. It’s a lateral move at best, since I suspect you haven’t been able to hold the same job, anywhere, for more than a half a year. The gambling gets in the way. Also, the habitual over-sleeping. You eat lunch every day at the same greasy burger joint, preferring yours, of course, smothered in onions. You’re about to be evicted. Once you are, you’ll move back in with your sister, which is unfortunate since she lives with two children, a small dog, and her husband, none of which can stand _you_. You worked out today but neglected to shower after – my guess is free trial gym membership. The communal showers make you nervous. Somehow I doubt you’ll keep on going after that trial expires, even _if_ your brother told you it’s a great way to meet girls.”

Finished with her analysis, she frowned lightly, eyes narrowing. “I can’t _actually_ find a reason to talk you out of your attempted advances at me,” she admitted. “I can merely reiterate my earlier conclusion, now with increased conviction: I am not at all interested in you.”

The good news was, flattering or not, that seemed to have done the trick. The three drunken men were standing there listlessly, staring at her in puzzlement as they struggled to comprehend what had happened.

The bad news was that, from behind her, Sherlock heard a soft intake of breath.

“That,” John said slowly, “was…amazing.” His voice was full of wonder, surprise, and tentative disbelief.

Sherlock stared straight ahead, not daring to move, heart sinking. She’d taken too long, underestimated the time it’d take for John to get close enough to hear. He must’ve arrived somewhere in the midst of her spiel on the third man.

It would’ve been, for him, more than enough.

She wasn’t facing his direction, but he saw her profile, heard her voice; heard her _speak_. The game was no doubt up.

A strange confliction of thought occurred in her head as she ducked and walked quickly out the door of the pub without looking back or saying another word. _Don’t follow me,_ she pleaded, but at the exact same time: _Do._

Her steps were quick. It was getting dark, and more people were on the street going home.

Still there was no missing the voice calling after her, “Hey! Hey, wait a minute, stop! Please!”

She made a decision very fast. There was no sense, only danger, in having this confrontation out in the open. She ducked into a nearby alley. John showed no hesitation as he followed.

“I said, wait up – oh.” He stopped, surprised to find her waiting for him. But he caught his breath, recovering quickly. “Good. I wanted to talk to you. What you did back there-”

“Surely it’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” she observed with a smile, but her voice was tight. She moved closer so that they were within arm’s reach of each other.

John laughed, wry and ironic. “Well, no. That is true.”

This was such a mess. But even knowing all the consequences, she couldn’t deny how happy it made her to see his face again. Her one and only friend in the world.

“Hello again, John,” she said, warmly, in what for her could even be said to be a manner emotional.

The smile fell from John’s face. He looked at her, puzzled.

“I’m sorry…” His head shook. “Have we met?”

It was one of a very few times Sherlock was rendered entirely speechless.

“…What?” she managed.

He shook his head again. He was squinting at her, considering. Making a show of visibly trying to remember who she was. “Have we met before? I can’t really recall-”

“That isn’t _funny_ ,” Sherlock said, voice coming out strained, angrier than she might’ve expected. John flinched, wincing apologetically.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he repeated. “It’s just you’re not ringing a bell, except for-”

“Except for the part where you know exactly who I am,” Sherlock cut in, intense. “Except for the part where it may’ve been months, but we used to see each other every day!”

He opened his mouth wordlessly at that, baffled. She read his face searchingly but his confusion didn’t seem a cruel prank. He seemed completely sincere.

But _how?_ How was it possible?

“Are you really saying you don’t recognize me?” He started to nod. She moved closer, stepping into his personal space. John moved back in automatic reflex, unnerved. “ _Me?”_ She raised both hands, gesturing towards her face. “It’s me; it’s Sherlock!”

He gave a slow, purposeful blink. Apparently trying to convince himself he’d heard right.

“You’re…claiming to be _Sherlock Holmes?”_

“I’m not claiming anything,” she exclaimed. “Look at me!”

Another blink. A sideways twitch of the head. “I’m looking,” he assured her, sounding disconcerted.

The gears in her head were spinning erratically, trying to make any sense of this. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded.

“Look.” He held up a hand, even as he was slowly shifting backwards. “It’s just…you don’t exactly _look_ like Sherlock Holmes.”

“Of course I do! Who else would I…?” She was shouting now. This was possibly the most awful thing she’d ever experienced. She’d never felt so at a loss. “John, you know me-”

He broke in, incredulously, pained, “If this is supposed to be a joke, I don’t think-”

“-and I know you,” Sherlock continued, cutting him off frantically. “And no, of course it’s not a joke! Why are you doing this? What’s _happening_?”

But John was shaking his head again, with a grim expression on his face. He was walking backward, out of the alley, putting distance between them swiftly as he could.

“Yeah, look, I’ve got to go.”

“No. John, look at me.” Her voice rose, insistent. “Please. John, _wait-_!”

She went after him but he was already at the street, already starting to turn away. She hung back, freezing at where shadow met light as if held in place by a barrier, wanting desperately to go after him but logic still in play enough to warn against causing a scene. Chasing him down, yelling, would do just that.

So she was forced to stand there and watch as her friend ran away from her. Her one and only friend, John Watson…who said he didn’t even know who she was.

*

Ms. DeWitt waited until Bickerton and MacPherson were well gone, until it was abundantly clear Vicki wasn’t about to leave, before she turned in her chair to address her.

“Is there something on your mind, Dr. Havisham?” she inquired.

Vicki shook her head, trying to clear it as she focused on her boss.

“It’s only, I can’t help but wondering if we might be going about this the wrong way,” she began.

Ms. DeWitt raised her eyebrows. “Go on,” she said invitingly.

“I mean, look at who we’re talking about here. This imprint.” Vicki walked back towards the desk, gesturing with one hand as she tried to find how best to word it. “We’re talking about a genius, who has a reputation for thinking one step ahead and outside the box at all times. I don’t know how successful trying to follow her is really going to be.”

The older woman looked skeptical. “You think that she’ll be able to _out-think_ the GPS tracking device implanted on her?” she said pointedly.

“No. Of course not.” Vicki shut her eyes briefly as she tried to stay composed. “Even that only goes so far, though.”

 “So what do you suggest?”

"What if we stop thinking of this as just another Active runaway, and start thinking of it as if we’re really chasing after Sherlock Holmes?” Vicki circled around to the closer side of the desk, meeting Ms. DeWitt in the eyes. “We should take another look at what we know, try to figure out where she’d likely head next.”

She waited with bated breath. For a moment Ms. DeWitt was silent. She glanced at the floor, away from Vicki, and nodded slowly as if coming to a decision for herself.

“Dr. Havisham,” she began, smoothly, “I know that you resent this particular imprint was not given to you to construct-”

“What?” Vicki demanded, caught off-guard. At DeWitt’s telling look though she had to backtrack. “Alright, I do. A _bit_ ,” she stressed. “Just a bit. That’s all.”

Ms. DeWitt folded her hands and rested them on her desk in front of her as she stared the programmer down. “It was nothing personal, you understand. For the most part the assignments are divided between you and Dr. Bickerton randomly.” She paused, pressing her lips together. “But, in this case, it was thought given your known _interest_ in the subject material, it would be better if you were less involved.”

Vicki looked at her agog, hardly able to believe what she was hearing. She’d only become interested in Sherlock Holmes when _everyone else in London_ became interested in Sherlock Holmes. Sure, she’d followed the news about it, and thought the story was interesting. She’d made no secret of that. But that was as far as it went.

“What, just because _I’ve_ actually looked at Dr. Watson’s blog, and Bickerton hasn’t,” she demanded, incensed, “that made me unsuitable? It’s not like I’m an obsessed _fan_ , or anything!”

“I know you aren’t, Victoria.” Ms. DeWitt’s calm and commanding tone was as much of an attention-grabber as her use of Vicki’s first name. “Believe me, I do. But with such a high-profile assignment, it was necessary everything be above-board.”

Vicki crossed her arms tightly. Her head shook, and she felt absolutely furious.

“Look, I know how this is probably gonna sound, in light of our earlier conversation about jobs and everything,” she said tersely, “but Bickerton _did_ something with the Amalthea imprint. I know he did. Cut a corner somewhere when he was putting her together, or something.”

She leaned forward, voice beseeching as she could make it.

“She’s erratic. She doesn’t listen to what her handler tells her, even outside of what you might expect. There is a _problem_.”

“Dr. Bickerton has assured me that he followed all the necessary protocols in his work,” Ms. DeWitt said, dismissively. “In any case, this is subject for review once we’ve recovered the Active in question. Right now, that must be priority one-”

“But, Ms. DeWitt…” Vicki cried, only to be cut off.

“Please, Dr. Havisham.” There was nothing particularly polite about the Head’s tone. In fact it was mightily disapproving. “It won’t look well for your record if I have to order you out.”

Vicki swallowed, and nodded, lips working together nervously. She took the hint and left the office.

But instead of going back to her private work area, she headed back to the main imprint lab.

She just couldn’t get the nagging uneasy feeling out of her head. Bickerton wasn’t there – and while it was far from regular, there was no strict rule against one programmer looking at another’s work.

With a glance to ensure she was unwatched, Vicki bent over the terminal and brought up the Amalthea Holmes imprint, fingers typing furiously.

“Alright then,” she murmured to herself, eyes never leaving the screen. “Let’s have a look at you.”

She entered in the commands necessary to start mapping the separate pieces of the imprint out.

And then she froze, straightening up to better gaze at the screen with wide eyes, as with a beep almost the entire imprint was shaded the same color of vibrant blue.

Her jaw dropped as she realized what she was looking at.

“Bickerton, you _bloody idiot_.”

*

It was getting colder as it grew closer to nightfall, and John zipped up his jacket all the way, before stuffing his hands deep inside his pockets.

It was a longer walk than he usually liked back to his place, especially in the chilly kind of weather, but he took it anyway.

Considering the kind of evening he’d just had, he figured his head could do with the clearing.

Still, he felt more relieved than he might have usually, when he arrived back at the place that for the last ten months had been ‘home’.

Between his funds from the army and his miniscule pay from the clinic he wasn’t able to afford much. A second floor apartment with one bed, in a building with thin walls and occasionally unreliable heating, and pipes that tended to leak. If he saved and scraped, he could probably do better, but why bother?

It was…comfortable. Or it was functional, more like, at least.

Pulling out his key, he checked his mailbox in the hall, which turned out to be empty of anything but magazines and junk. Tucking it under one arm he climbed the stairs, unlocked the door, hung up his jacket and started to turn around.

“Evening,” came a low mutter of a voice from the center of the room.

John froze, stifling his shout of alarm down to a disconcerted sound.

Then he turned swiftly to shoot a withering, exasperated look at the dark-haired man sitting unassumingly on John’s beat-up sofa, long legs stretched in front of him and hands folded in his lap.

“You know, I understand that your whole deal these days is the cloak and dagger routine, but could you possibly find some way of warning me that you’re going to _be_ here already when I turn up?”

John dropped the mail off on his kitchen table with a huff. “Otherwise, I might start developing a heart condition,” he remarked, acerbically, as he started sorting through the envelopes.

Sherlock favored him with a cool, emotionless glance.

“If you were ever going to develop a stress-induced heart condition you assuredly would have, by this time,” he responded, both indifferent and decisive. John twitched. Sherlock didn’t to notice as he pressed both hands to opposite arms of the sofa, using the momentum to catapult himself to a standing position. “And anyway, how precisely is it that you would expect me to warn you? Hang a sign on the outside of your door?”

“You could,” John said seriously, ignoring Sherlock’s pointed sarcasm. His gaze drifted between his mail and tracking the other man’s movement as he circled the room with an aimless grace that reminded John of nothing so much as an irate housecat. “I mean, not a literal sign, obviously. But you could do something else, like a sort of code. Like moving a flower pot from one side of the door to another.”

“You don’t have a flower pot,” Sherlock returned flatly, neither looking at John nor stopping his erratic pattern.

“It was a hypothetical,” John sighed. “Alright, putting a necktie on the knob, then.”

“You don’t have any neckties suited to the purpose. Those teenagers living two floors up would almost undoubtedly steal it.” There was a minuscule pause before Sherlock continued, “Besides, how would you explain to your neighbors what a necktie was doing on the door when you weren’t home and you’re not supposed to have a roommate?”

“Fine, fine. I’ll just resign myself to regular scares then, shall I?” John mumbled, shaking his head. There were a few coupons in the mail he might want to keep, but nothing else. “You turning up at all hours, when I’m out, when I’m sleeping, when I’m in the shower-”

He trailed off, sniffing the air. He looked at the stove behind him, then back at Sherlock.

“Are you cooking something?”

“It’s an experiment,” Sherlock explained. He’d stopped pacing and was gazing at the wall, fingertips pressed together before his chin.

John stole another look. “Is that my good saucepan you’re using?”

“Define ‘good’. If by which you mean ‘large enough to hold fluids at the volume I required’, then yes. It is.”

John let out a long-suffering sigh. “Right.” Abandoning the mail, he went over to have a look at whatever strange concoction was bubbling with a half-hearted gaze. “As a point of consideration, I’d prefer if you kept these kinds of experiments to a minimum. Pretty sure some of my neighbors are already convinced I’m cooking meth.”

“If they are, they must not have much experience with methamphetamines, as that’s not remotely what the process smells like.”

John knew better than to ask him how he knew that.

“You need something to eat?” he asked instead.

“No. Fine,” Sherlock said, in that distinct ‘I’m thinking, leave me alone’ sort of way.

“Right,” John said, more to himself. Not knowing what else to do he did a small loop of the apartment, straightening things that didn’t particularly need to be straightened.

Nearly three months now this had been going on. One minute John had been in mourning, the next – Sherlock was back, moving in and out of his life like a ghost. Or not ‘like a ghost’ at all, considering he had never been _dead_.

John wasn’t sure what’d prevented him from killing Sherlock himself at that point: his immense relief, or the fact that Sherlock was, for Sherlock, remarkably apologetic about the whole thing.

 _“I had to, John,”_ he’d kept saying, in that intense tone where he desperately needed John to grasp something. _“I had to.”_

And what had there been left for John to do but say _“Sure,”_ and realize that, yes, he did understand?

In the end he was just happy to have his best friend back. Too bad things were made more complicated in the fact that to the rest of the world Sherlock had to stay dead.

John had no idea where he was staying half the time. Obviously he didn’t live with John twenty-four-seven –though the number of times he climbed in through the window and took up space as carelessly as if they still lived together was enough to almost make one think otherwise, at times.

He knew that when Sherlock felt the need to take his thinking process in a more destructive direction, like putting holes into a wall, he would head back over to Baker Street, where Mrs. Hudson had apparently developed the habit of turning up the telly very loud and whistling to herself cheerfully whenever strange noises began emanating from the empty flat upstairs.

John didn’t know for sure if Sherlock had actually come out and announced his re-existence to their former landlady, or they were just all pretending mutually to not be in the know regarding one another. Like a lot of things about Sherlock these days, he didn’t ask.

“So,” John remarked, finally breaking the silence, “something interesting happened to me tonight.”

Sherlock opened his eyes and took an audible breath through his nose, like he was just waking up. “Oh?”

“Yeah.” John walked back into Sherlock’s line of sight as the other man returned to the sofa and didn’t so much sit down as flop onto it. “I ran into someone, on my way home.” He paused for effect before finishing, “Someone that was claiming to be you.”

“That’s not all that unusual,” Sherlock said, instantly dismissive. He reached a long arm over to grab some of John’s mail that’d been left within reach and start flipping through it himself. His brow furrowed, and he sniffed disdainfully. “Small-minded and easily-amused people always will have a _thing_ for dead celebrities.”

John said, very pointed, very emphasized, “It was a woman.”

“Oh.” Sherlock immediately dropped what he was doing, fixating on John in curious surprise. “That _is_ interesting.”

“Yeah, right?” John shook his head as he went on, musing, “And the thing is, she seemed so _obviously_ distraught when I didn’t believe her. I mean, just…devastated.” His hands fumbled expressively. “I actually felt sorry for her.”

 “The highlight of a delusion is its all-encompassing belief in an alternate reality, John,” Sherlock told him, matter-of-fact. He snatched up one of John’s letters from the floor, which appeared to be some submission form for a sweepstakes, and pocketed it for reasons known only to him. “She has conviction in her irrationality that must be, by definition, absolute.”

“It wasn’t just that, though,” John continued, trying to explain what he’d experienced. “She was _really_ good. I mean, we’re not just talking parlor-trick impersonation, here. She talked exactly like you. There was a bloke, in the pub, and she did that thing where you analyze someone just be looking at them. Completely tore the guy to pieces.”

 “There are a small number of ways that that can be faked,” Sherlock told him, unconvinced. “The easiest is that it was a set-up. Arranged ahead of time and put on for your benefit.”

John had to scoff. “You really think that anyone is that interested in me?”

Sherlock gave an eloquent shrug and no more. With a sigh, John sat down on the couch beside him. It was so small that their knees touched.

“Oh well,” John said in summation, not knowing what else to do. He glanced at Sherlock. “What about you, then? How’s your week been going?”

“New case,” Sherlock responded, brisk. “Not especially complicated, but looks to be worth a few days’ worth of amusement.”

John frowned, though not because he knew what was a few days’ amusement to Sherlock were several days of hair-tearing frustration for somebody else. It was more along the lines that he knew, nowadays, Sherlock got his cases by sneaking into crime scenes of different divisions all across London and leaving helpful answers via anonymous notes.

“You really need to be careful about that sort of thing,” he reminded Sherlock. It was nothing he hadn’t said before, but they both knew he couldn’t help worrying.

“No one ever sees me, and I make certain the personnel involved with each investigation have hardly any chance of talking to one another,” Sherlock stated. More pointedly, he added, “How else am I to keep myself occupied?”

John nodded in resignation, knowing that anything to keep himself from boredom was crucial to Sherlock’s survival; that these days he was all but keeping a white-knuckled grip on sanity since he couldn’t be the “great detective” anymore. But still. It was hard to deal with.

“You know you can’t keep this up forever.”

Sherlock sighed, leaning back against the sofa. When he spoke again, he was quieter and more serious. “I know.”

They’d had this conversation before, too, and neither of them needed to repeat anything out loud. Eventually, Sherlock was either going to have to leave London, or come out of hiding and stop being dead. It was obvious that what he really wanted to do was the second – and just as obvious that it would never be safe to do so, long as the stain left by ‘Richard Brooks’ and the pursuit of the media still existed.

John sighed as well, gently. After a beat, Sherlock murmured, “I’ll come up with a plan, ultimately.”

“You know, you could let on to Lestrade that you’re still around,” John suggested, going back to focusing on the short term. “Obviously he couldn’t bring you in on cases on an official basis, but-”

“No,” Sherlock cut him off. “He’d be complicit in breaking the law. Not to mention all the attention he’d draw to himself, sneaking off information and going back to crime scenes when no one else was around.” He rubbed at his face absently. “It’s fortuitous enough he didn’t lose his job over what happened. I’d rather not put him into such jeopardy.”

John couldn’t help looking at him in surprise. “You know, I think that’s the most forethought I’ve ever heard you put into the best interest of another human being,” he had to observe.

Sherlock turned his head to meet his eyes at an angle. When he pulled his hand away from his face, he looked wearied, but still he smiled.

“Yes, well. I _am_ trying to be better about such things,” he offered. “If there’s one thing I’ve been taught recently, it’s dangerous to underestimate how important the people one cares about can be.”

John smiled back, and offered up a light chuckle.

“Don’t be in a hurry to change _too_ much.”

“Oh no,” Sherlock responded, amused and disdainful, as he got up from the sofa; “Then I’d run the risk of ending up like everybody else.”

John laughed, both at the revolted wrinkle to Sherlock’s face as he said it and the impossibility of the suggestion.

“Don’t worry,” he reassured his friend, as he reached for the television remote. Whatever Sherlock had on the stove was starting to bubble very loudly. John figured it was best they cover up the sound. “You are absolutely, without question, one of a kind.”

*

The sun was setting. Sherlock stood by the bank of the Thames, having allowed herself to run the risk of being cornered, because sometimes she found staring at a large body of water helped her think.

And right now, she needed to _think._ She needed desperately to make sense of what’d occurred.

The tips of her fingers trembled when she tried to move them, and there was an anxious lump in her throat, just like there’d been at Baskerville. Once again she was in a state of heightened unrest she would’ve thought impossible for her, because nothing was adding up: either her senses were lying to her, or something that logic told her could simply not be so had happened.

How could John look right at her, and not know who she was?

She had anticipated a lot of things. That he would be angry. That he might even hate her – if not for leaving, then for coming back, for having never been dead at all. That it would be hard for him to believe it. That he might go into some state of shock.

But never, never, that he would meet her eyes and betray no recognition at all.

 _Think,_ she ordered herself, desperately, practically screaming.In her thoughts she ran, racing past all scenarios, holding up each piece of the puzzle one by one and trying to fit them together. _Think!_

The answer had to be there, somewhere. It always was. She had to find it.

There was the sound of footsteps approaching her that she ignored. It was only when he was too close to be avoided that she finally paid enough attention to identify Rodrigo by the sound of his breathing, angry through an open mouth.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said to her heatedly, no preamble. What do you think you’re playing at, running off from me like that?”

She didn’t respond. She was barely listening, thumb pressed to her lips, muttering under her breath.

Rodrigo sighed. “Okay, I get it. You’re cleverer than me and can shake me at any time. Ha ha, you’re very funny. But come on now, it’s time to go.”

Sherlock turned, not to speak to but rather _at_ him. “He didn’t recognize me. He hadn’t drank nearly enough alcohol, he showed no signs of being drugged-”

“What are going on about?” Rodrigo demanded in exasperation.

“John. John Watson.” She twisted away again. “Looked right at me, in near broad daylight. Obviously identified with my habit of speaking, my manner, and yet even still…this makes no _sense_.”

“John _Watson?_ ” Rodrigo repeated. He sounded slowly but very expressly alarmed. “You saw him? You went and _spoke_ to him?”

“Not my intention,” she said, dismissive. She didn’t care to explain the entire situation. “That isn’t the important thing here.”

Rodrigo carefully cleared his throat. “Look. You can sort this all out, after you’ve relaxed some. Right now you obviously need a treatment-”

“No!” Sherlock paced past him, flicking one arm in an impatient gesture of dismissal. “Not now, I don’t need any _distractions._ Not when I’m so focused. I need to think this through, I need quiet, I need space…” She grasped at the sides of her scalp for a moment in frustration then pressed her hands to her face before dropping them. “Why John, _why?_ What’s happened to you?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “How can this be, there must be an explanation. There _must_ be.”

Rodrigo came towards, movements careful but aimed with a purpose. “Ms. Holmes…Sherlock…”

“What could’ve happened to him: no, no, no, no, no,” she shook her head at each idea she dismissed, and then her eyes flew open as something clicked into place. “ _Oh_. That’s it. That must be.”

Rodrigo was standing right behind her. “Sherlock!”

“It isn’t him,” she realized. “It’s _me_. The question isn’t what’s happened to John; it’s what’s happened to me.”

Rodrigo latched onto her arm tightly, physically pulling her from her train of thought. He turned her enough so that they had eye contact.

“Sherlock,” he said with what was supposed to be a reassuring smile, his voice a tight and even calm, “everything’s going to be all right.”

“Now that you’re here.” The words tumbled from her mouth, unthinking, and as she said them she felt it. A light sense of relaxation, anxiety lifting.

And then in the next instant she realized that, no. That wasn’t right. That didn’t make any sense.

Rodrigo’s smile had grown with relief. He nodded. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

A response was trying to force its way up her throat. Sherlock dropped her head as she tried to make everything slow down, try to take stock of what was going on here.

She knew she was taking longer than was expected, because the smile was already starting to fade from Rodrigo’s face with unease by the time she looked back up at him. She met her handler dead in the eye.

“No,” she said, voice hard and even, assured. “No, I don’t trust you at all.”

Rodrigo’s expression changed to one of panic. She saw him reaching for his gun so she intercepted the movement, knocking his hand out of the way, taking his weapon and then sending him tumbling to the ground.

She pointed the gun down at him with one steady hand.

“What did Rossum do to me, that John can no longer recognize me?” she demanded. “Tell me.”

Instead of responding though Rodrigo slipped a hand inside his suit pocket, trying to get his phone to call for help. Sherlock moved in quickly before he could and struck him in the head, sending him unconscious.

She stepped back from his prone form, glancing around to make certain nobody had seen them, that no backup was already on its way. She pocketed the gun.

And then Sherlock ran.


	4. The Adventure of the Empty House

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title for this chapter shamelessly stolen -- er, borrowed from one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes stories.

Mrs. Hudson was by nature an early riser. Mornings for her meant a bit of breakfast, followed by watching the telly or reading the newspaper, and then since most people in her building were either still asleep or at work, attempting to find something else to do.

Sometimes she would bake. If she had any messages, she would return phone calls. Or visit the neighbors. Or she’d putter about with her window-box garden. Or just tidy up – and if she couldn’t find anything to tidy up in her own home, well, she’d slip off into the flat of one of her messier tenants and tidy up for them instead.

That morning, she’d no messages, and last week there’d been a row with the neighbors, so there was no inclination to go visiting. It was still the very beginning of a very chilly spring so there was no window-box garden yet.

And so there was no recourse left for her but baking, since she no longer had her favorite messy tenants to clean up after.

As she started laying out the flour and sugar for her scones, her gaze drifted directly overhead to the ceiling. Just one layer of flooring away was the living room area of 221B.

 _Why do you still keep it empty, dear,_ she’d been asked by those that knew her, in a manner both sympathetic and concerned. A few months at the get-out had been understandable, but as time marched on and she kept it unrented, people started to wonder.

Wouldn’t it probably be better, if she found someone to fill that empty silence upstairs? Wouldn’t it be best, not to mention more practical? Wouldn’t that probably be a good idea?

Her answer would always very careful. For of course, yes, it would be very practical – if not for the fact she knew 221B still got its occasional use.

No one knew that she knew, or if they did they said nothing about it. Sometimes she wondered if she was even supposed to know, but _honestly_. Just because she was an older woman didn’t mean she’d taken entire leave of her senses.

But when asked about renting out the flat again, she would sigh, and in a confessional tone admit oh yes, that would undoubtedly be best; it was what she’d always meant to do eventually, but oh, she just got into the habit of putting it off and putting it off, and now it’d been so long. The flat was probably filthy; it’d been _ages_ since anyone had gone up there, after all. She would probably have to hire someone to come in and clean it out, and that seemed like such a bother to look into. Oh, she knew it would have to happen, but right now she simply didn’t have the energy. She had other renters to look after and her hip was acting up again. She didn’t know the first thing about looking up professional cleaners – and it _would_ have to be professionals: she was a landlady, after all, not a housekeeper.

It was a flimsy excuse clung to by a doting old woman, so of course people always believed her.

And if the other renters in the building said something about how – well, it was mad of course, and they knew that, but _sometimes_ in the dead of night they thought they’d hear footsteps, or even muffled yelling, coming from the vicinity of 221B. Or sounds as if furniture were being moved around. One tenant even related, chillingly, that once he swore he heard the faint playing of a violin.

The word that inevitably came up, uttered with greatest reluctance, was ‘haunted’.

Mrs. Hudson would tut, and say very sternly and firmly that no, that was impossible. She never heard anything and anyway, there was no such thing. It was silly to even suggest.

And then she would punctuate her statement with an uneasy glance in the flat’s direction, or by pressing a hand to the collar of her blouse in a way designed to look instinctive.

It wouldn’t do to play along too much, but who was she to dismiss a good explanation for the noise?

And if every once in a while she had to remind herself that it would look frightfully suspicious if she gave into her urge to leave one of her homemade cakes on the little table upstairs, just in case someone _happened_ to drop by – well, she couldn’t help that she’d always been the sentimental sort.

Still that left her with the problem of what to do with all the scones she was baking. As usual, she’d put together too much dough.

She was paused in her actions and squinting down at the bowl past her flour-coated hands, frowning thoughtfully, when someone rang at the front door.

Wiping her hands off on her apron, she went to answer it, giving an absent pat at her hair.

Through the peephole she glimpsed a young woman in a short peacock blue trench, hands stuffed in her pockets, strands of blond hair sticking out from beneath her cap. Mrs. Hudson opened the door.

“Hello?” she greeted with friendly curiosity.

“Um, hi.” The young lady was bent forward slightly in an attempt to get out of the wind, and once the door was opened shuffled closer to the step. “Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Dr. John Watson?”

The name immediately made the older woman a little wary. “Oh dear,” she said with a sad frown. “I’m afraid Dr. Watson doesn’t live here anymore.”

“I know. I mean, I’d gathered, but I was just hoping that…” The stranger backtracked. She straightened her shoulders and pulled out one hand to adjust her cap, so it didn’t cover her eyes so much. “My name is Dr. Victoria Havisham,” she introduced herself, trying to start over on the right foot.

“Oh!” Mrs. Hudson was charmed, and intrigued, and she accepted the offered business card. Reading the address, she remarked brightly, “Why I know this building. Big office, central downtown. Not far from where I have to go sometimes to pick up my packages.”

“Yeah,” the younger woman agreed, absently chewing her lower lip. “It’s a bit distinctive.”

“So you work at a private clinic, then? ‘Pygmalion Institute’. Such an interesting name!”

“Yeah,” the other said again. She was clearly trying not to get impatient when she continued, “Look, I’m afraid I can’t get into it, confidentiality and all. But I really need to speak to Dr. Watson for a consult. Tried him at work but I couldn’t get ahold of him. You wouldn’t happen to know where he lives now, would you?”

Mrs. Hudson considered the woman for a moment, contemplatively.

She was dressed nice but her shoes were scuffed and her nail-polish chipped. She didn’t _seem_ like a reporter. And while plenty of those had tried hounding poor John in the beginning…well it had been ages since any of those folks had cared about him.

If Sherlock had still been around – or _known_ to be around, anyway – she would’ve been much more careful. All sorts of strange and unscrupulous types would try getting close to him. She was always on guard.

But John? Now that there was no ‘Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective’, anymore, who could ever be after John?

“I should have his forwarding address around here, somewhere,” she told Dr. Havisham. “Just let me duck inside.”

The relief on her face was obvious. “Thank you. Thank you so much, I really appreciate that.”

“Don’t mention it, dear. Anything to help one of John’s patients…it’s nothing too serious, is it?”

“Ah, no,” she was assured. “More like I need to ask his opinion on something. Minding my p’s and q’s.”

“Of course.” Mrs. Hudson nodded, smiling, and within less than a minute had the address for John’s new apartment written down on a scrap of paper. “Can’t be easy, these days, being a doctor,” she observed. “What with so many lawsuits going on and all.”

Dr. Havisham nodded, glancing at the paper she held carefully in her hands. “Thanks again for your help,” she said, evidently not wanting to comment about lawsuits.

“No trouble at all, dear. Tell Dr. Watson his old landlady says hello.”

She waved goodbye at the young woman, then quickly closed her door, rearranging her shawl to fight the chill she felt coming on from the wind outside.

At least John was still doing something exciting with his time, she mused. Occasional nighttime visitors aside, sometimes it felt things were almost too calm these days at Baker Street.

*

The first thing Sherlock did was get rid of her phone.

It wasn’t enough she simply toss it, of course. She took it apart. Carefully she extracted the internal mechanism containing the GPS device. The rest of the phone she threw down a sewer, while the that part she left at the bottom of a taxi.

It shouldn’t be possible for the GPS to continue carrying a charge after it’d been separated from the rest, not with a common mobile. But it wasn’t _impossible_ – the technology existed. She determined it was a good idea not to leave anything up to chance where Rossum was concerned.

Her next move was to get out of London, and travel back to her flat.

Not the safest of moves. Predictable, obvious, and those looking for her would know exactly where it was, considering the company had provided her with it. But if she was to go on the run she’d like at least a chance to gather supplies, resources, and the very fact that it was so obvious and careless a maneuver might just mean that they wouldn’t immediately suspect it. It would be the last place they’d look.

And there was also the chance that she might find something else to go on. A clue, a bit of data that would help explain what’d been done to her. If Rossum had left any bugs or surveillance equipment, she could use that against them.

There was no stopping for rest or anything else. The instant she’d left Rodrigo unconscious she kept moving, and arrived at the building in the dead of the night.

It was dark but she didn’t need any source of light to see by as she moved around. She knew the place well enough.

An isolated building, surrounded by woods and meadows on a long lonely stretch of road. The other tenants were bankers and businessmen and rarely home. It was a middle to upper-class residence, one that Sherlock probably would’ve never been able to afford once upon a time, if left to her own devices, but of course Rossum had been footing the bill.

Retroactively, she considered just who these people were that she had decided to deal with. An American corporation, ostensibly founded by experimental medical technology and research – not nearly as well known by name in Europe as they were in their home country, but still highly-funded and with connections backed by considerable power. The type of group that people who believed in _conspiracies_ tended to talk about.

Sherlock as a rule didn’t believe in conspiracies. The majority of them were never anything more than the result of paranoid and mundane minds drawing correlations out of simple coincidences.

But every once in a while she was forced to yield to the evidence when an actual one turned up.

Whatever was going on right now, whatever it was she had somehow caught herself in the middle of, it was undeniably dangerous and had a great potential to end in disaster for her.

But Sherlock couldn’t deny that it was the most excitement she had had in so many months.

She felt _alive_ again, all the parts of her brain active and running now that there was a suitable challenge for it to be applied against. There was a mystery here, one that its participants would do anything to keep her from solving, one she was doggedly determined to figure out. At long last she’d something _deserving_ to work on.

Under the secluded cover of darkness she avoided the front door to her building, instead electing to scale the side via a nearby tree onto her balcony. After a preemptive check to ensure the security system was off she smashed her way in through a window.

However, she only made it as far as two rooms before somebody turned the lights on and then tried to attack her.

Sherlock reacted quickly. She used the arm around her throat to flip her attacker over, their hold releasing in shock as they crashed bodily into the wall. Smoothly she drew the gun she still had in her coat pocket and pointed it down at the assailant.

It turned out to be a middle management-looking type in sweats, and he raised his hands over his head, still upside down, practically sobbing in fright.

“Take whatever you want, please,” he begged. “Just don’t kill me.”

Sherlock frowned, not moving a muscle as her eyes swept over him. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

He didn’t appear to understand her. He only shook his head, and cowered, and repeated, “Please.”

Determining he was no threat, Sherlock kept the gun trained on him as she turned her head to take in her surroundings. What she saw – well, _surprised_ her.

The dimensions of the flat were exactly what she had been expecting. The interior furnishings were _not_. This wasn’t the cheap, classy but economic furniture that’d been provided by Rossum that she never bothered to replace. These were worn, but clearly worth more money when they had been new. There were matching designs and lamps and all sorts of ridiculous little decorative touches that spoke to someone making a modest income that liked to show off his money even if he didn’t really know how. Bookshelves being used to house magazines, a carpet with wear patterns in it, paintings and photographs and an accent wall that accidentally clashed with the curtains.

There were two possibilities. Either someone had moved all her things out, and gone to great trouble to make it look like the new occupant had actually been here awhile – or she had never lived here in the first place.

It argued against reason. She had memories of being in this place, this room. But they were hazy, indistinct. Something that her memories almost _never_ were.

She thought she remembered living in the flat, but couldn’t actually recall what she did when she was there – couldn’t remember waking up that morning, if it’d been on the couch or the bed. If she had eaten breakfast, and if she had how she had made it, and which cupboard did she keep the silverware in, and what was inside her refrigerator.

There was only one logical answer. Her memories were false. She had been drugged, or brainwashed, or somehow otherwise tampered with.

But if she had never been in the flat, it begged the question where _had_ she been all these past months, when she wasn’t out working at the behest of Rossum?

Though the question was only a minor consideration, compared to the chilling realization it was paired with: she couldn’t entirely trust her own thoughts any more. Rossum had compromised her. They had, somehow, gotten inside her and played games with everything she was. They had altered _her mind_.

On the inside in the midst of these revelations, she was enraged, and more than a little frightened.

On the outside, however, she was a dead and detached calm.

“Give me your wallet,” she told the man she had the gun pointed at. “Money, major credit cards, whatever you’ve got.” She gestured with the gun, indicating he should get up. “Quickly.”

He gulped, nodding in fear, and did what she asked of him. He retrieved his wallet and brought it back to her, handing it over.

Sherlock took a step back, glancing away but arm with the outstretched weapon never wavering as she sorted through the contents of the wallet with one hand. She removed any form of identification and pocketed the rest.

“Very good,” she told the man, smoothly. “I’m going to go out the front door now. You’re going to unlock it for me.”

“A-all right. Yeah, sure. Whatever you say.”

As he hurried to do so, Sherlock smiled at him. Just before slipping through the newly-unbolted door, she remarked, “Oh, and once I’m gone, do be very quick in calling the police.”

The man froze, puzzled, key still grasped in his hand. “Sorry?”

“You heard me,” Sherlock told him. Then she exited out the door, slamming it behind her, putting the gun back away as she wasted no time in running down the stairs.

Rossum would no doubt have the resources to pull rank on a police investigation, wanting both to keep the incident quiet and any useful information of her whereabouts to themselves. But the more time the police had to get involved, the harder it would be for them; the more delay would be caused before they could try using whatever they gained at the flat to go after her.

Right now, it was a game of cat and mouse, until Sherlock could figure out enough to make it otherwise. That meant it was essential, crucial, she find ways of keeping ahead.

No one could find her, until the exact moment she was ready for it.

*

Adelle had just finished an interview with another perspective client. It had gone smoothly, with them both getting what they needed from one another – he had received assurances of the quality of their services and their utmost respect as to his privacy, and she had gotten a read on him and decided that he would be a manageable patron and someone who could be trusted with the safety of her Actives.

Once the gentleman had been escorted out of her office, Adelle let her poised and peaceable smile fall.

“Any updates on the Salome situation from Mr. MacPherson?” she demanded of her secretary.

“No, ma’am,” he told her quickly. “Shall I get him up here for you?”

“Please do,” she ordered, and then she went back into her office and sat down.

If there was one thing that could be said for Mr. MacPherson it was that he was prompt. Within less than two minutes he was hurrying back into the room. She gazed at him and he knew her well enough not to wait for a verbal prompt before he launched into a summation of the latest series of events.

“Still no sign of the Active, visually,” he told her in his gruff, clipped voice that reminded her of nothing so much as a bulldog. “One of the teams had her within a couple blocks, but the she caught one of the trains out of the station and was gone.” He made a face. “Problem with the way the tracker’s calibrated is it’s built to keep tabs on them at _walking_ speed, turns out. They hop aboard something much faster and the signal gets lost – have to wait for the satellite to latch on again before we can use it.”

“Perhaps something that should be mentioned to the people upstairs next time they want feedback on the technology we’re asked to use in our protocols,” Adelle commented dryly.

MacPherson continued, “I’ve got people at the station now, looking into where she went.”

“Very good,” Adelle said, offhand. “And, there is nothing else?”

He shook his head. “Let you know the minute I have anything, ma’am."

“To the very second would be preferred, Mr. MacPherson,” was her crisp reply to him. Adjusting her position on the couch she looked at some papers she had spread out before her. “That will be all for now.”

He started to turn to leave, but hesitated. “I noticed Havisham isn’t in today.”

“Yes, she decided to finally use some of her personal time,” Adelle responded, not bothering to look up. “She won’t be in the rest of the weekend.”

MacPherson’s expression showed both disapproval and displeasure. “She wanted to take time off _now?_ In the middle of a crisis?”

“Well, it’s not as if it involves her directly,” Adelle said, lack of concern for the situation obvious. “And she did clear it with me first. If anything I applaud her initiative, making sure her head is well out of the line of fire.” After a pause, she glanced back up, meeting her head of security’s gaze firmly. “Rest assured, if anything does come up, she is aware that she is still on-call.”

The man nodded, getting the hint he was dismissed, and left to get back to his work.

After he left Adelle lifted her head again slowly, looking in the direction he had gone with a contemplative frown.

MacPherson was a capable and confident employee, who was very good at what he did. But Adelle had to confess even after such time as he’d put in working for her, there was still something about him that rubbed her the wrong way.

It wasn’t so much that he was aggressive: no, if anything that was a quality she would desire in someone who headed her security team. And it wasn’t his job performance. MacPherson came in highly recommended and at the top of his field, and with good reason.

It was something about his manner. Considering what his duties were, it was perfectly acceptable that he be matter-of-fact, blunt…but she wouldn’t have objected to a little more _polish_. Presentation, even an air of suaveness. Someone who could impress their clients at a glance as easily as she could.

No; though he had come far closer than had been the case with his predecessors, Adelle still wasn’t entirely satisfied with Mr. MacPherson. Oh, she still trusted him to do his job, and she certainly wasn’t about to let him go until their current problem was solved.

But once it was over and done with, she was strongly considering using the breach in security as an excuse to fire him and start looking for another replacement.

With a faint sigh, Adelle let what she’d been holding slip from her fingertips and leaned back against the cushions of her designer sofa.

Over twenty-four hours and they were still no closer to catching their runaway Active. And, from her understanding, the severity of the situation had only increased.

Before the imprint had only wandered off seemingly for the sheer amusement of it. Now, if Adelle was reading what had happened with her handler correctly, she had an active mistrust of the Dollhouse. Add in that she’d already visited the place alleged to be her home and the imbedded tracking device’s apparent unreliability, and they were running out of easy ways to find her.

Adelle suppressed the urge to sigh again and pressed the nearby call button to ring up her secretary.

“James, would you please bring me a cup of tea,” she said, though momentarily she was tempted to ask for something stronger.

*

John woke in the morning to an empty sofa that may or not have actually been slept on – the pillows were rumpled enough, in any case, though with Sherlock’s restless habits that could signify nothing – and a note.

_May stop in again tomorrow. Also you are out of milk, butter, and mustard. –SH_

John huffed, rubbing a hand across the creases in his forehead. He decided he should probably focus on the positive; that Sherlock was apparently trying to form the habit of being considerate enough to give warning for his visits. Not the more ludicrous, like the fact that he found it necessary to add his initials, like the note could possibly be from _anyone_ else.

And John wasn’t even going to let himself think about the rest. The milk didn’t surprise him, but he’d just bought butter two days before. And he knew there’d been plenty of mustard. What Sherlock had done to use up both ingredients so fast, John was firmly of the opinion that he didn’t need to know.

He took a cold shower (the pipes were acting up again), got dressed, and decided he would stop and get breakfast on his way into work. Partially because he was worried what he might find if he opened his refrigerator.

There was a light layer of snow on the ground that was already turning to mush. As John glanced around, wondering if he wanted to hail a cab, he noticed a young woman on the sidewalk who appeared to be asking directions from one of the men that lived in his building.

Then he did a double-take as, in response to whatever inquiry the woman was making, the other man pointed at him.

John was already starting to draw himself up defensively as the woman hurried towards him, an intense look on her face that he couldn’t quite read.

“Excuse me,” she called as she got nearer. “Excuse me - are you John Watson?”

“Who wants to know?” he asked in response, flat.

“Relax, I’m not a snoop or anything.” She kept enough distance to not be making him nervous, but barely that. “I just wanted to talk to you. It’s important, I promise.”

“Yes, well,” John started taking a step back as he raised a warding hand and gave a self-depreciating smile, “trust me when I say I’ve had enough of strangers talking to me about what they consider important for a lifetime, thanks.”

He had meant it mostly as a general observation, but something seemed to perk up in her expression as he said it.

“I’m not the first person who’s approached you over the past couple days, am I?” she inferred, sounding far more knowing than John would’ve preferred. “Let me guess: someone else came up to you. A woman, about my age, with long dark hair.”

John froze. “How do you know that?” he demanded.

“Did she tell you that she thought she was Sherlock Holmes?” the woman continued, and if she hadn’t had John’s attention before that she certainly did then.

Instead of moving away he stepped closer, so that they were right in each other’s faces. He stared at this woman’s expression, trying to make some sense of her.

“Do you know her?” he asked, incredulous.

Her gaze went to the sidewalk briefly as she moved her hands inside her pockets. “I’m a doctor at the facility she escaped from. Her name’s Amalthea. She’s-”

“Not well?” John guessed acerbically, eyebrows rising. “You know, I’m pretty sure she was _following_ me. If it’s part of your job to keep someone like her locked up, then I have to say it doesn’t look like you’ve been doing it very well.”

“I’m very sorry, Dr. Watson,” the blonde woman said, breathless, “but I have to ask you, do you have _any_ idea where she might have gone, after she talked to you? Did she say anything else to you at all?”

John shook his head. “No. She got upset at me for not recognizing her, and then she took off. Can’t tell you anything more than that.”

“Okay. I see.” Her lips pursed in disappointment. “When was this?”

“Only yesterday,” he informed her. “Why? You don’t mean to say you think she’s still around?”

“Couldn’t say. But we’ve got people out looking for her, people that are very good at their job.” She pulled a card from her pocket and offered it to him. “But can I ask you, if you do see her again…could you please give me a call? It’s really for her own safety, that she get brought back in soon as possible.”

“Yeah, sure.” John took the offered card automatically, still frowning at the young doctor in something like disbelief. At least he had an explanation for what’d happened, but it was still alarming.

“Thanks.” The woman squared her shoulders, breath coming out in a white puff in the cold air. “Well…good morning, then.”

Having made her goodbyes, she walked off briskly, rounded the corner and disappeared.

John looked at the business card finally. It was very simple, with just a name, a phone number, the name of the private clinic she worked for, and a street address.

He shook his head again. Well, he’d have something to tell Sherlock about, when he saw him.

*

At the train station Sherlock had bought two tickets, each going in a different direction, paying for one with one of her stolen credit cards and the other with cash. The latter was for a ride back into London, and that was the one she intended to take.

London was her playground, her jungle, and all other such quaint descriptive phrases to cover the sentiment that she knew it like the back of her hand. Better, even, were such a thing possible.

She could head for anywhere in the world, but London was the place where she knew best how to get her work done.  Where to run, where to hide.

She needed every possible advantage she could get with the people that were currently pursuing her. She needed to be able to focus, leave nothing to chance, while she was in search of answers.

Yes – there was nothing else to be done. If it came down to it, London would be where she made her final stand.

Not that she was anything close to giving up just yet.

After getting off the train she headed straight for a dodgy part of town, where she knew it was frequented by con artists and pickpockets.

Within a few minutes she identified a young man that looked promising, keeping his head down and walking quickly. He had new boots, with sturdy treads for running, but a secondhand coat covered in patches and mended tears.

Sherlock intercepted him, walking backwards so that they faced each other with her barely a pace away as they both kept moving. He started, bemused and panicked, probably suspecting she might be the police, but didn’t stop walking right away.

“Hey,” she said to him brightly. “Trade you.”

He blinked at her, baffled. “Sorry?”

“My loot, for some of yours,” she clarified. She took a surreptitious look without quite moving her head to assure that no one was watching then pulled a hand out of her coat pocket enough to show part of a credit card. “Platinum,” she announced.

The pickpocket had a hungry look to his eyes. “Yeah? It good?”

“Took it in a break-in,” she informed him. “You’ll want to spend it fast. But it should be fine. It’ll take at least another day before the bank puts a stop on it.”

He nodded, and it looked like the rusty wheels in his head were turning. “How much?”

“Give me two of yours, and we’ll call it square.”

The pickpocket seemed to find that agreeable. He stopped in his tracks, glanced over his shoulder – far more obviously than she had – and pulled out a few wallets from his pockets. He rifled through them, then handed her two cards.

She took them in one hand, giving him the platinum card at the same time in the other.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” she told him, then turned up her collar decisively before marching off.

Now she had two cards Rossum didn’t know to associate her with and still plenty of paper currency. She could be thankful that the man she robbed at not-her-flat had kept a well-stocked wallet.

The next step was to change her clothes. She picked up new ones at a cheap bohemian shop, everything from shoes to underwear. She’d checked to see if anything had a tracer sewn into it and found nothing, but it was better to be abundantly safe than sorry.

Instead of ditching her original garments, she left them stuffed underneath a loose tile on a rooftop, a hiding place she’d found before that occasionally served her well.

After wrapping her coat around everything else and stuffing it inside the compartment, she lingered momentarily, letting her thoughts work around inside her head. The wind tugged her hair in an annoying fashion and she reached to restrain it in a tight plait with fast, practiced gestures as her mind continued to race systematically.

She was still supposed to be dead. There was virtually no one that she could go to for help, at least not in the immediacy.

John, for reasons she hadn’t yet deciphered, remembered who she was but did not appear to recognize her.

She had a significant but limited amount of untraceable funds. She had no access to the internet or a telephone though she could easily get ahold of either, should she deem in necessary.

For ten months she had believed she was working for the Rossum Corporation and the entire time she had been lied to. They’d done something to her, something unknown and sinister, to alter her memory – no doubt it had to do with the mysterious ‘treatments’ she’d been receiving.

Now that she knew something was off, that there was something to look for, she was able to pick apart the flaws quite easily: the long gaps where her memories ceased to be true recollections, and turned into hazy games of fill-in-the-blank.

It was infuriating, and unsettling, to think she hadn’t been completely in control of her own mind. The one thing she’d always been able to trust, the one thing upon which she could depend, the one thing where her faith was absolute. She tried not to let herself become too…rattled.

She needed focus. Now, more than perhaps ever, she needed to focus.

Sherlock climbed down from the roof and found a cheap motel. She signed in under the pseudonym ‘Violet Hunter’, paid with a credit card that had a different name on it, and the man behind the desk didn’t even look twice. No doubt he saw it all the time, for all sorts of myriad reasons, and cared about none of them.

He pushed over the key on a grubby plastic ring. “Be anything else for you, love?”

Her skin prickled against the recently-acquired clothing. She missed her coat. She had no home to go to, there was an entire shadowy corporation out there looking for her, and it was hard to focus on the thrill of the game when her thoughts kept stubbornly, stupidly looping back around to the fact that she could _feel_ the careless sticky fingerprints all over her mind.

She still missed John. He still didn’t believe she was herself.

Inside her pocket her fist closed tight around crumpled bills.

“Where’s the nearest place around here I can buy a pack of cigarettes?”


	5. Only the Improbable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are some direct references in this chapter to entries from both [John's blog](http://www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk/) and [Sherlock's website](http://www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk/), so if you haven't looked at either before I invite you to give them a quick visit ;)

It would have surprised no one, and least of all Sherlock herself, that she did not sleep that night.

She stayed up, and alternated between pacing and sitting down staring off into space.

When she paced, it was in different formations in the limited amount of freed floor that she had. Though often she drifted into a pattern out of simplicity: up from the head of the bed on the right corner, alongside the front nearest to the single window with the dirty glass, then down from the foot again on the side opposite.

(The walls were thin. But no one complained about the sound she was making – quiet sounds, but incessant, repetitive, her feet going heel-to-toe heel-to-toe against the floorboards. It was expected in a place this low-end there’d be sounds. No one complained because they’d lowered their standards in coming here. Drifters and crooks and drug users and the car salesman two rooms down that was having an affair with his wife’s sister.)

When she sat it was folded up, in the center of a bed – the mattress was old, and there was a dip in the middle where it’d been pressed down upon by the body weight of one too many an occupant.

Sherlock sat in the center of the dip with her long legs brought in against her body until her knees were practically underneath her chin, and smoked her cigarettes, and gazed at the same blank spot on the wall. She saw nothing and everything.

By morning her breath reeked of nicotine and her fingertips were covered in ash. She had analyzed, weighed and measured every single recollection she had up to a certain point, and come to several significant conclusions.

One: whatever it was that happened, it began after she jumped off the roof at the hospital. Everything in her head was clear as crystal before that.

Two: the purpose of the mental alterations seemed to be, primarily, to distract her. To keep her brought to heel. They kept her thinking she had willingly chosen to work for Rossum; they kept her from wondering about things outside of the little world they had tried to box her up in.

Three: she was still Amalthea Sherlock Holmes. They had not _reduced_ in her in any way. She could still trust her own thoughts for the most part, within reason. She could absolutely trust her own feelings, observations, and deductions.

Four: she could trust no one else.

Five: whatever they were up to, after everything they had done, Rossum wasn’t just going to let her go.

After a beat of consideration she got off the bed, pulled her outermost layer of clothes back on, and brushed her hair with her fingers. She needed to go out.

She wasn’t certain what her next move was going to be, but she wouldn’t be able to figure it out without more ammunition.

She checked to ensure she didn’t leave anything behind in the room and then locked the door behind her.

On her way past the front desk of the motel the same man that’d checked her in looked up from his magazine. His eyebrows rose with a snort.

“Had a rough night, did we?”

Sherlock neither slowed in her straight path to the door nor gave any other outward sign she had so much as heard him. She kept walking.

When it’d become abundantly clear she wasn’t going to respond he called after her retreating back, affronted – “Well okay, good day to you too, then!” – but she wasn’t listening.

She walked three blocks until she found an internet café.

With a different credit card than the one she used at the motel, she paid for one black coffee and two hours of time at a terminal. She spent the first fifteen minute pretending to shop online until she was sure no one was looking over her shoulder and she hadn’t been followed.

Then she got down to business.

Her first stop was her own website. No surprises there: everything was exactly as she had last left it. There’d been no attempts to hack it, obviously no updates and no one had taken it down, though the forums had gotten a little insane in the months immediately following her public demise.

Then she went to John’s blog. Again, about what she had been expecting: the same posts she had read, the same comments and exchanges she remembered making. Though her hands trembled slightly as she moused down over the entries for the past year – it had taken John nearly two months after her death to make any updates, and then it was only a post of a single line.

After that there were another several months of silence and then, suddenly, in the beginning of October he made a new post simply entitled _“I don’t want to talk about it”._

After that, he began updating regularly if infrequently, with brief notes on the happenings in his own very mundane, very monotonous life. He purposely steered far clear of any mention of Sherlock, Scotland Yard, Moriarty or Baker Street.

Interesting. It was a little hard to get a read on without anything to examine, but it looked as if he’d spent a period of nearly seven months in deepest mourning, only to catapult into a forcible kind of acceptance with the past shoved firmly behind him.

It didn’t read with any natural psychological pattern she had ever done research on. And it certainly didn’t sound like the John Watson she knew.

And then there was the other bizarre detail. All of the posts on John’s blog read the same way she remembered them to, right down to the very word, except for one thing: in them he referred to her as a _man_.

She sat there hunched in her computer chair and face set in a perfect hardened blank as she thought. Her coffee, which she’d only taken two sips of and then promptly forgot, had gone ice cold.

Then leaning forward again, fingertips working across the keys, she brought up a search engine and typed in her own name.

Despite the total indifference she’d long held towards the work and opinions of the popular media, she couldn’t help it as she reacted to the some of the old headlines brought up with a mixture of sneering and cringing. _“Fake Genius Commits Suicide”?_ Really? Had the copy-editor been ill that day?

But there it was, right alongside the bylines, sometimes in black and white and sometimes in color. Photographs of Sherlock Holmes, internet celebrity and world’s only consulting detective – a very male Sherlock Holmes, described with unmistakable male pronouns and adjectives within the articles the images were attached to.

Tapping a finger furiously against her lips, Sherlock brought up one of the pictures for a closer look, leaning in, eyes narrowed and fixated.

There he was, her strange doppelganger, that ridiculous hat over his head as he swerved in a failed attempt to avoid the camera, John hunched down and following close behind him.

She _remembered_ that day. But that picture _wasn’t of her_. It made no sense.

Sherlock slid all the way back in the chair until she was sitting perfectly straight, forcibly easing the tension out of her shoulders. With an absent frown she looked at her hands, turning them over.

She knew her hands, the shape of them, the feel of using them. Remembered when they had been smaller, when she was younger, and how they’d changed along with all her other extremities when she had grown. She knew her own body. There could be no doubt in that.

She closed her eyes and breathed slowly through her nose.

Wherever this rabbit hole was going, it evidently went even deeper than she could have imagined.

And she was starting to think, despite her inclinations, she couldn’t possibly go it alone.

But she had few allies to begin with. And not only would they believe her dead, but if what she was seeing in her research was any indication they’d be very skeptical of her identity. And then there was the fact that she had no way of knowing how far Rossum’s arm reached – who might or might not be connected to them.

She needed someone she could absolutely trust.

Ideas and facts collided, tumbling one over the other inside her mind. She clicked back to look at John’s blog again.

His single line entry after he thought Sherlock Holmes was dead: _He was my best friend and I'll always believe in him._

She considered it, and reached her conclusion.

She went back to her website again and put in her administrative password.

*

Whenever possible Adelle preferred that her employees come to her when she needed to speak with them, as a matter of formality. However, sometimes for a change of pace, it was perfectly alright to go down inside the House for herself and move about.

And then, sometimes, it became a necessity.

“Dr. Bickerton,” she greeted her programmer, waiting in the open door to his station with her hands on her hips.

He started at her voice, turning around from where he’d been standing in the front of computer, hard at work, to find her behind him.

“Ah! Ms. DeWitt.” His expression turned sheepish as he realized why she must be there. “Right, you wanted to see that file.” He glanced around, anxious, and then quickly found what he was looking for inside a nearby manila folder.

“Got it for you right here. I found it when you called, but then I was in the middle of something and I didn’t have the time to bring it up right away, and, well…sorry.”

Fumbling and stammering a bit, he trailed off. Adelle continuing waiting, still eyeing him expectantly.

Bickerton offered a wan grin as he played with his glasses. “Don’t let this fool you, though. Nothing’s been delayed down here. Ah, in fact – I am a whole _two_ imprints ahead of schedule.” Proudly he gestured to what he had up on the computer screen. “Been handling this load of engagements just fine by myself. It hasn’t been a problem at all.”

He glanced around the lab, musing, “It’s pretty nice having this much space to myself, actually. I could get used to this.”

Adelle smiled thinly. “Best not to get ahead of ourselves,” she told him, pointed.

“Right.” Bickerton attempted to hide a grimace. She couldn’t tell if he was truly abashed or merely faking it. In any case, he offered her the file. “Ah, here you are then. Ma’am,” he hurried to add.

“This has the recruitment information on Salome’s original personality?” she confirmed.

“Well, no, not exactly – there _was_ no real recruitment, with this one.”

“Ah yes,” Adelle recalled, as she turned aside some pages and was met with a photograph taken for the Dollhouse’s records: a young woman lying in a hospital bed hooked up on life support. “I remember. That poor girl.” She turned a few more pages, studying them intently. “And no next of kin listed, I see.”

Bickerton shook his head.

“Well then,” Adelle shut the folder decisively, handed it back to him in a smooth movement, “that settles it, doesn’t it?”

With perfect timing Mr. MacPherson appeared heading in their direction, Mr. Mendez shadowing close at his shoulder. Adelle caught a glimpse of their approach out of the corner of her eye and turned to face them.

“At this point it’s more to cover all bases than anything,” she said to them, “but I would like to make it official: the use of deadly force _is_ permitted in the retrieval of this Active, if necessary.” She enunciated the last two words carefully, pausing for a fraction of a second before she went on. “While recovering our missing goods is still at top priority, it is secondary to maintaining the secrecy of the Dollhouse.”

She stepped closer, cocking her head slightly. “So gentlemen, if it comes down to it and you have a shot, I suggest you take it.”

“With pleasure,” Mr. Mendez declared. He wasn’t nursing any physical bruises from his Active escaping but there was no doubt there’d been significant ones to his ego.

Mr. MacPherson quickly dismissed Mendez, giving him new orders and sending him back out into the field with another team. As he finished up Adelle began to walk away, and her head of security hurried to keep up with her.

“Progress, Mr. MacPherson?”

“Both the information we’ve gathered firsthand and the data from the tracker agree. Our Active is definitely somewhere back in the London area. It looks like she must’ve gotten rid of the credit cards she stole, so we won’t be able to use them to follow her movements.”

“That was forward-thinking of her,” Adelle commented, wry. “But then I’m given to understand that’s to be expected.”

The whole time she was speaking she kept moving forward on the carpeted walkways at a brisk pace. Mr. MacPherson seemed to instinctively refuse to walk alongside her. Instead he hung back behind and to her left, in a position of subservience.

It meant that every time he spoke he would take quick steps to catch up to her then drop behind again once done. Hardly very efficient.

“Doesn’t matter,” he remarked, dismissive. “We don’t need them. We’re closing in on her anyway, as we speak.”

“How long?”

“If she stays put, less than twenty-four hours.”

Adelle slowed, turning her neck to meet his eyes as she inquired, “And if she doesn’t?”

Mr. MacPherson shrugged. “Two days, maybe three tops.”

Adelle nodded in silent reply. MacPherson seemed to gather that was longer than she would’ve preferred. He cleared his throat and moved to match her pace again.

“Ma’am, if I may – if time is the big factor here, maybe you should make the call?” he offered.

“No,” Adelle disagreed, knowing what he was referring to. “I prefer to wait until I’m forced to play that card.”

She looked away as she resumed her quick steps.

“Swiftly as our well-connected ally would be able to find her, if at all possible I would like to see this issue resolved utilizing only our _own_ resources.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Mr. MacPherson affirmed. “As would I.”

Adelle glanced at him, hard, before breaking away in clear dismissal.

“Then do it.”

*

Even without his note, John wasn’t much in the way of surprised when he got back with a bag of groceries to find Sherlock stretched out on his couch reading a magazine.

Sherlock didn’t quite completely turn his head to acknowledge him. “No work today, then.”

It wasn’t a question but John treated it like one anyway. “Nah. Supposed to be a slow week so they let me off for the next few days.” He craned his head to get a look at the title of Sherlock’s magazine, only to discover it was in another language. “Little _light_ reading, then?”

“Russian medical journal. And, yes,” Sherlock answered, with his nose stuck firmly inside it.

John’s mouth quirked in silent laughter and he shook his head, though mostly at himself, as he methodically began putting away his shopping.

How much longer, he wondered, before he stopped being amused by every aspect of Sherlock’s…Sherlock-ness? When would it eventually get old? Or, would it ever?

Would he go on being delighted by body parts in the fridge and odd inquiries at equally odd hours until the end of his days?

It was a strange cycle. Ages ago when they first met, he’d been aggravated at first, and then as time went on it was almost as if he got worn down, until he met every bit of near-insanity with jaded acceptance, not so much as a bit of resistance or even a second thought.

And now, after having spent months alone, with everything so quiet and listless and gray, convinced that he would never again have an argument with Sherlock about the sanctity of a man’s own laptop or watch Sherlock find universes of analysis in what to John looked like ordinary pocket lint or listen to Sherlock yell at people on day-time television about how their actions made no logical sense…

After having tried coming to terms with ‘ _There is no more Sherlock Holmes’_ , and then out of nowhere, all of a sudden again there _was_ …

John found himself reveling in every minute of it.

He knew it was in its own way quite mad, really, that he’d enjoy this. Letting Sherlock get away with it, feeding into his quirks and isolationist persona; letting a friend who was perpetually stuck in some sort of limbo, not legally alive but most certainly not dead, sponge off him and come in and out of his life like a whirlwind, assuring that as long as he was around John could never be even remotely considered ‘normal’.

Probably counted as some sort of codependent behavior, or maybe even just flat-out _dependent_. That would be what his therapist would say. John could imagine her disapproving tone, if he told her even half, even a fraction of what he’d really been up to.

But John hadn’t been to see his therapist in three months.

He couldn’t think of a time when he felt like he needed therapy _less_.

“So, speaking of medicine,” John spoke up as he finished closing the fridge for the final time. “I found out something more today about that strange woman that was claiming to be you.”

“You’re still thinking about that?” Sherlock asked impatiently, in the tone he always used when he was perpetually mystified and frustrated by the way no one else in the human race could analyze something and then lock it out of their minds the way he could.

He leaned back even further, stretching his upper body so that he could shoot a look at John upside down. “ _Honestl_ y, John. It was some random madwoman with an obsession of grasping at the fringes of public infamy.” He settled back down again, shaking the magazine in punctuation. “Let it go.”

John ignored him, waiting for the silence to settle before he continued speaking, unbothered. “Someone _else_ came up to me. This time, it was a doctor that was treating her. Guess she’d been locked up at a private mental health facility somewhere, trying to fix whatever went wrong.”

“See. Delusional,” Sherlock said, decisively pleased with himself. “I told you.”

“Yeah, well. I just hope they find her and get her off the streets.”

Absently John pulled the card out of his pocket and read it again with a tilt of his head. “That’s weird. The address for this place says it’s right downtown. You’d think people would make a fuss about having a mental hospital so close to them.”

“They probably keep their existence under the radar. If it’s privately-funded, they wouldn’t have to make the disclosures a public facility would.” Sherlock got up and took the card from John’s hand. He turned it over, looking at the card itself (probably analyzing the paper or looking for residue or god knew what else) before reading the actual words, with that perfectly still expression that was both simultaneously curious and disinterested.

“Pygmalion Institute. Strange choice of reference,” Sherlock remarked. “Pygmalion was a sculptor in Greek mythology who carved a woman so beautiful he fell in love with his own creation and the gods brought her to life.”

He didn’t so much hand the card back to John as let it fall from his fingers, leaving John fumbling to catch it.

“You’d expect to see a plastic surgeon’s named after Pygmalion, or maybe a health spa. Physical trainers. Maybe a very egotistical beauty parlor. But a psychiatric clinic?”

“Yeah, well, maybe it’s a reference to helping people _shape_ themselves, _re-mold_ their minds into something new, or whatever,” John guessed in a way that was distantly cynical. “Some of that New Age philosophy. Not that it looks as if any of that worked for this Miss Amalthea…”

“What was that?” Sherlock had gone back to sitting with fingertips pressed together, but now he looked at John with sharper interest. John blinked.

“Amalthea,” he explained slowly. “That’s what the doctor I ran into said her name was. Why?”

Sherlock turned his head away again, musing. “That’s odd.”

“What is? What’s so odd about it?”

He gave John an absent, amused smile. “That’s what Mummy planned on naming me, if she’d had a daughter rather than a second son.”

Whatever John might have been about to say was interrupted by a sound from his phone, informing him he’d received a text.

He pulled it out and was startled to see the number was Lestrade. John still talked to the detective from time to time, but very infrequently, and he couldn’t remember the last time the other had sent him a text.

_What’s happening with Sherlock’s website? Do you know anything about this?_

John stared at the message a moment, feeling a sense of apprehension. His laptop was sitting on his bed – he ran to grab it.

There was a new post on The Science of Deduction, the time-stamp for that very day. John’s eyes scrolled across as he tried to convince himself what he was seeing.

“Sherlock! Have you made any updates to your website recently?”

“Of course not.”

“Well somebody _has_.”

John made to turn around and bring the computer over so Sherlock could have a look, but of course the other man was already right there, having gone from indolent stillness to moving like lightning while John wasn’t looking. Sherlock bent forward, peering at the screen.

In that empty void that was his expression John thought he caught a few ripples in an otherwise still pond: surprise, wariness, uncertainty.

The new post read: _You said you still believed when I wasn’t there to hear it. I need that now. Meet me where it began._

Sherlock stood straight again. “Anyone could have gotten that from your blog,” he said, having clearly read John’s mind.

“But wouldn’t she have had to guess your password to make that post?” John pointed out.

“No one could’ve _guessed_ my password,” Sherlock retorted, making a face at how absurd he found that suggestion. “More likely this is the work of a computer hacker. My page is only as strong as the security of its provider.”

“So she’s a lunatic _and_ a computer genius, then?” John asked skeptically.

“You’re assuming these two incidents are related. They might not be. The second could be the work of some adolescent with too much time on their hands and a morbid sense of humor – coincidence with an unfortunate sense of timing. Odd but not impossible.” He glanced at the clock. “I have to go.”

“Go? What? Where are you going?” John asked, but without much urgency – he figured it probably had to do with whatever case Sherlock was secretly working on.

“I have to meet a man about a wooden sawhorse,” Sherlock explained in passing. He already had his coat on and was prying open John’s window. He used the nearby fire escape more often than the door.

“What does it mean though, do you think? ‘Meet me where it began’.”

“What, you can’t tell? Obvious,” Sherlock replied, shortly. And then he froze on the verge of climbing the windowsill, turning back to face John. “You’re actually thinking of showing up.”

“Well…” John began, but then trailed off, knowing a denial was pointless.

Sherlock gazed at him searchingly, frowning. For Sherlock, looking a little alarmed. “Why?”

John gave a weak smile and a shrug. “Morbid sense of curiosity?”

“It could be a trap. It could be more than what it first appears, and actually be a conspiracy.” Sherlock looked out the window, something flickering across his face. “I can’t go with you to watch your back. I-”

“It’s a _public place_ ,” John interrupted, having caught on to what the message meant. “In the middle of the day. Really, what’s the worse they could do? Probably you’re right and this is just somebody’s idea of a sick joke; there won’t be anyone there. Or if there is it’ll be that woman…” John smiled in an impish way, trying to show how unworried he was. “And I’d be surprised if she weighs more than eight or nine stone. I think I can handle her.”

Sherlock examined him a moment. “Take your gun,” he finally stated.

John almost rolled his eyes. He sighed. “You know, you really do think I’m an idiot, don’t you?”

He expected Sherlock to simply be out the window at that, not as much as a look back or a goodbye. But to his surprise that didn’t happen. Sherlock lingered, giving John a furtive look out the corner of his eye, head turned so to partially conceal his face.

And John thought he must be getting bored and overthinking things these days, or something. Because for a moment he could’ve sworn Sherlock was about to confess something like _, “I worry about you”._

Instead he went, brusquely, “Be careful.”

John nodded – but it didn’t matter. Sherlock was already out the window and gone.

*

Vicki’s feet were starting to hurt.

She made her living in an office, either sitting or standing behind a computer all day. She wasn’t used to doing this much walking around. And now there had to be a blister forming on the back of her heel where her shoes pinched, she was sure of it.

She was starting to think she was being stupid. The Dollhouse had its own security team and they were out looking for Salome too, after all. What made her think she stood the better chance of finding her?

Just because she thought she understood what was really going on here, in a way that she couldn’t make the others grasp…

She started at the sudden alert noise from her Blackberry.

She pulled it out, half-expecting it to be an email from work, and was startled to see it was an alert message she set up ages ago, for when one of the blogs she watched updated.

Something twisted in her stomach, anxious, as she realized which site it was for: The Science of Deduction.

Vicki quickly checked the page and read the message, her mouth moving to form the words silently to herself as she examined it with deep scrutiny.

 _Meet me where it began_.

For a minute or so Vicki stood there in the street, thinking hard.

Then biting her lip she used her thumbs to type in directions to her Blackberry, once again bringing up John Watson’s blog, and zeroed in on the entry entitled _“A strange meeting”._

*

It wasn’t hard to get to Bart’s. Though the entire way there John couldn’t help but keep asking himself why he was doing this.

His explanation to Sherlock, of ‘morbid curiosity’, only covered it in part. He was curious as to what the hell was going on, and how the woman he kept running into, crazy or not, was able to pull off the things she did. But even that wasn’t enough.

He supposed it came back to part of what brought him to Sherlock Holmes in the first place: he missed the excitement. The unpredictable. Even, occasionally, the dangerous. And while, whether or not he meant to, Sherlock still provided plenty of spontaneity by virtue of being himself, it wasn’t the same now that circumstances forced him to keep things relatively low-key.

So here John was, running off on the very thin chance the lead he was following wasn’t a hoax, and if it was all it meant was he’d have a second meeting with a delusional person who would probably have nothing to say he hadn’t already heard. All for the sake of trying to keep his life interesting.

John tried not to think about it too hard.

But as he reached the hospital, he found himself remembering the strange woman’s reaction the last time he talked. The hurt confusion and anger on her face when he said he didn’t believe her.

John considered himself a decently empathetic individual, but never had he been so strongly struck by a total stranger’s emotions before. He couldn’t shake this weird sense, almost like he owed her something because of it. But her reaction had just seemed so _real_.

And that trick she did, reading off the facts about those other men at a glance…John had only seen two people besides Sherlock who could do something similar, and neither of them had his seamless fervor in doing so. But the woman in the pub had. She’d sounded exactly like Sherlock, even in her delivery of the words.

Method acting was one thing, but that – it was downright spooky.

_“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”_

John broke his musing silence by chuckling depreciatingly at himself. Right; so the woman that’d been following him was some refugee from another dimension where Sherlock Holmes had been born female. Because _that_ made perfect sense.

Clearly he was letting himself think about the whole situation too hard.

But even so he realized a sense of anticipation was building inside him, as he walked through the front door, took the elevator up to the proper floor, and then made his way down the hallway to where he and Sherlock had met for the first time.

He couldn’t help being struck a little by how eerie it was – below him he knew was a busy hospital, but up on the floors where the laboratories were, there was next to nobody around. The only sound was a distant buzzing from the lights and his own footsteps.

Which made it all the more clear when John’s pulse started to pick up as he got nearer to the room he was looking for…only for him to find himself facing a closed and locked door.

 _“CLOSED FOR MAINTENCE”_ , read the sign that had been firmly affixed over it.

John let out a sigh. “Right,” he said, after it had a moment to sink in. “Well that was all a huge waste of time.”

“Not necessarily,” a voice remarked from directly behind him.

John jumped, tried not to yelp, and whirled around. Standing half a meter away was the woman from the pub, in different clothes but still distinctly recognizable. She gazed at him with blank expression, something fixated and intense about her eyes.

John forced a laugh. “All right. So you’ve got the sneaking about part down. Well done.”

“You got my message and decided to come after all. I have to admit I was a little…concerned.” The pause gave John that same unnerving familiarity in its delivery.

In the light of the hallway, he got a much better look at her, and he had to admit her physical resemblance to Sherlock was more than just the color of her hair. There was notable similarity; not so that one could claim twins or even siblings, but very much there.

If, John supposed, someone had wrote down a description of Sherlock and somehow neglected to use any pronouns, then this woman would definitely fit. She was tall, slender, with long limbs and broad shoulders. Her eyes weren’t quite the borderline _unearthly_ shade of Sherlock’s but they were very pale. Her hair was still black and wavy; she just had more of it. The chin and nose weren’t right, but the cheekbones and overall shape of her face were.

“That message _was_ from you,” John said, forcing himself to focus. “You changed the site.”

“Yes.”

“How did you get past the password?”

“I didn’t have to ‘get past’ anything,” she declared flatly. “It’s _my_ password. I knew it.”

John gave her a searching, almost wondrous look-over. “You know I have to admit, you are very good. You’ve got the unthinking egotism down just about perfect.”

Her expression shifted slightly, becoming more forcibly schooled. “You still don’t believe me.”

“Well no offense, but I’d got my reasons not to,” John offered.

“Yes. And I know what those are now. You can’t believe me because by your recollections, as well as those of the rest of the world, I’m supposed to be a man.”

John hung there for a moment, and then he nodded. “Yeah, I’d say that’s it in a nutshell,” he admitted, trying not to sound too bemused by the whole thing.

“But by my recollections I’m supposed to be a woman, and always have been,” she stated, matter-of-factly. “There has to be an explanation for the discrepancy. But so far I’ve yet to find it.”

John folded his arms. He couldn’t help replying with a little sarcasm: “Should be a pretty good one, when you get around to it.”

“John, _please_ ,” she emphasized, mixture of beseeching and frustrated. “I’m in the middle of something that goes so deep, even I am only just beginning to understand it. For once a complex mystery is staring me right in the face and I’m more anxious than I am excited. I don’t think I can do this all alone. I need your help.”

“That’s all…very touching,” John managed, “but what do you honestly expect me to say? Despite what you’re thinking, I don’t know you. And I’m not just going to go running off-”

“There has to be some way for me to convince you,” she interrupted. “Some story from our life together, some detail.” John shook his head resolutely and she ignored it, rushing on, stubborn: “The cases that we worked. All those silly names you gave them: ‘The Aluminum Crutch’, ‘The Blind Banker’. ‘The Speckled Blonde’?”

“I wrote them all up on my blog,” John reminded her. “You could’ve just read about them, gotten the details from there.”

“But, our first meeting. What I did to know so much about you: it was by looking at your phone.” She pointed at him, definitive. “You didn’t include _that_ in your blog.”

“I’ve _told_ that story dozens of times, to I don’t know how many people,” John protested. “Wouldn’t surprise me if it got back to you from one of them.”

“There has to be something,” she repeated. Her voice was lower, harsher, desperation creeping in. “There must be. I know it. Just ask me something. Whatever you want to hear. Go on, John: ask me.”

John gave a nervous, sputtering laugh. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you!” He gestured at her. “No matter what you say, there is no way I can believe what you’re trying to convince me of is true, because you’re not – there’s just no way. You _can’t_ be him. It’s impossible.”

“Not impossible,” she corrected, very firmly, soft. “Highly improbable.”

John rolled his eyes, putting a hand to his brow. “Oh, well done. Course you had to go in for that.”

“Does this count as irony, then?” she demanded, sounding more like she was asking herself than him. “I tried so hard, to convince you that I was a liar all along when I said goodbye to you, and you wouldn’t believe me.” John dropped his hand and stared at her.  “That it was a sham, just tricks and make-believe, because I thought somehow it would be easier. But you just…couldn’t believe me. And now that I want you to know I’m telling you the truth, I can’t seem to convince you of _that_.”

John’s mouth had gotten drier. It took him a moment. “What did you just say?”

She only gazed back at him, silent. Daring him – he realized – daring him to _believe_ her.

“Tell me,” John repeated, forcibly. “What did you just say? There is _no_ way that you could possibly know—I never told anyone. About that. About, about his-”

“About my _note_ ,” she finished for him, quietly.

“Stop it.”

Without realizing it John’s voice had risen sharply. He stepped in so that they were closer, threatening to get right in her face. But she didn’t flinch. She kept looking John in the eye, unblinking.

“Right now, whatever it is you’re doing, you need to _stop it._ I want you to tell me how it is that you found out about that conversation!”

“I know about it because it was me. I know what was said, because I said it.”

“No, _you_ didn’t!” John said through gritted teeth. “You didn’t say it, because you’re _not_ Sherlock Holmes!” He took a breath, trying to calm himself. “Look, I get that you obviously believe in what you’re saying and I am trying to act with a little sympathy, but now this isn’t a _joke_. I want you to tell me the truth.”

“I have told you the truth, John,” she replied simply. “I can’t give you any other.”

She was so completely sure of what she was saying. That or the best damn actor John had ever seen. He stared at her, mind and emotions racing, and tried to find some way out. Her being crazy and delusional was one thing, but she knew too much. How was she _doing_ it?

“There needs to be an explanation,” he said aloud, stupidly, still staring her in the face. “There must be something, some way I’m not thinking of, that you could have…”

“Someone’s coming,” she said all of a sudden, her expression changing abruptly to one of alertness.

“What?”

Before John could grasp what was happening she had glanced down the hall in the same direction he’d come from, then grabbed him by the forearm and started dragging him in the direction of a door.

He turned his head around and thought he got a look at an approaching figure – young woman, blond hair. John realized he recognized her.

“Wait a minute.” He had just enough time to get a glimpse of a sign that said ‘ _Lavatory_ ’ before he was forcibly pushed through it. “I can’t go in there, it’s the Ladies!”

“I’m certain you’ll get over it,” his kidnapper remarked, offhand. She pushed John behind her and then positioned herself very near to the door – trying, John determined, to watch for movement in the gap underneath.

“There’s no need for this,” John said. The woman shushed him, and without thinking about it his voice got quieter. “If that’s who I think it is, then I’ve met her before. And she isn’t a threat.”

“If it’s who I think it is, then she’s with Rossum,” the woman muttered, her lips barely moving.

John squinted in confusion. “What-?”

“Hello?” A voice called from outside; it was Dr. Havisham after all. John was relieved. She probably saw them run inside the bathroom. Maybe she’d be able to talk some sense into her patient. “Dr. Watson? Are you there-?”

He would realize later that the woman on the other side with him had been waiting for the approaching figure to get into position: right up against the door, on the verge of opening it.

Almost too fast for John to process, she leapt up. In a single swift movement she grabbed onto some fixture from the ceiling directly overhead with both arms, then kicked the door out – there was a harsh sound from the other side as it must’ve collided hard with the other woman’s face.

“Oh god,” John exclaimed, shocked.

He had no chance to intervene as the attacker dropped back to the floor, landing in a crouch, then got up and dragged the other woman inside the bathroom with them. She hurled the blonde at the wall by the sinks, hard.

Dr. Havisham landed with a pained whimper. She was dazed and bleeding from her nose, trying to mop at it frantically with one hand.

“This,” the black-haired woman explained crisply, “is Dr. Victoria Havisham. One of Rossum’s star employees. Whatever it is that’s happened I’ve determined they’re at the root cause of it. You can understand why I wouldn’t take so kindly to one of their people following us.”

John’s mouth dropped open but nothing came out. He looked at the blonde again. The expression in her eyes was terrified, not that he could blame her. But the next thing he noticed was that it looked like there was already far too much blood.

The madwoman gave a brief, cruel smile, and sniffed. “I’ll bet at times like these you really resent that clotting disorder you inherited from your father,” she remarked.

The blonde gave a low, unhappy groan from behind the hand clutching at her face.

John took a step forward. The uninjured woman stopped him with a gesture. “No. Leave her.”

“She could die,” John exclaimed. “I need to stop the bleeding, or…” He trailed off in chilled disbelief as the other simply shook her head then went back to looking at her victim in an expectant manner.

He tried to think what to do. He’d have to go through the mental patient if he wanted to help Dr. Havisham, and after having seen her move he didn’t particularly want to fight her. He could probably beat her, eventually, but the other woman could bleed to death in the meantime.

He decided to try reasoning with her. “Look,” he began, in as calm a voice as he could manage, “right now, it sounds to me as if you’re a bit confused.” He pointed at the blonde. “I met this woman just yesterday. She told me that she worked at a private clinic where you were being treated.”

The dark-haired woman narrowed her eyes at the other, pointedly. Dr. Havisham looked from her, to John, to back again, and then finally was looking at John when she blurted, “I lied to you!”

John gaped at her, at a loss. “What?”

Her words were muffled from her damaged nose and the blood, and she spoke rapidly, eyes darting in a panic back and forth between John and the other all the while. “I lied. I lied, when I told you that, where I was from, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t have much of a choice because the truth would’ve sounded completely _mental._ ” She sniffled violently. “I’ll tell you everything, I promise. Just please, help me, please-”

The dark-haired woman stepped back with a satisfied nod and John went in, numbly, to help.

It took a few minutes. He applied a lot of pressure, and then once the flow of blood had slowed, went to retrieve her dropped bag from the hall, which had a vial of Advate in it.

The entire time the other woman paced back and forth, impatiently. Once it looked like the doctor was in good enough state she resumed her position of standing in front of her, glaring down at the figure on the floor.

“All right, Victoria. Start talking,” she demanded. “And let’s be so good as to try the truth this time.” She prompted: “You work for Rossum, yes?”

“Yeah. I did tell you some of the truth, or at least as much as I could manage,” she directed at John. “I gave you my real name, but the clinic, it’s just a cover. Where I really work is a facility hidden underneath that building. We call it the Dollhouse. I work there as a programmer.”

“And what do you make, at this Dollhouse?” the other woman asked with intent curiosity.

“People.” Dr. Havisham let out a sharp sigh. “We make _people_.” She was looking at John again as she continued. “The rich and the powerful, they come to us, and they ask for the perfect date, the perfect bodyguard, the perfect whatever, and we do it. There’s a machine with all these memories on file, from hundreds, thousands of people, and we put ‘em all together however you like.”

She shifted her back against the wall, a strained, jaded quality coming to her voice.

“What comes out the other side is believable as can be, because that’s what the clients are paying for. Not an actor. Real.” She shook her head. “They don’t even know what they are. They’re _programed_ not to.”

“It can’t be possible.” John shook his head. It was unfathomable. “I can give you that if such a thing existed, people would go a long way to keep it secret, but that kind of technology…”

“It isn’t that far off,” the standing woman interjected, blunt. “Rossum is at the cutting edge of the medical field, always a step ahead of their competitors.” John recognized from her tone that she was thinking out loud; that she was hearing this for the first time same as he was, she was just accepting it a lot faster. “So why not assume instead of being one step ahead, they’re really two, five? Letting out just enough to keep up appearances while they keep the good stuff all to themselves.”

“Right,” Dr. Havisham sniffled. “Exactly.”

“And where do I come in?” the other demanded, intent.

“Well you’re one of them, you see?” She sighed, like she surprised it wasn’t already obvious. “One of our…products. Somebody asked us to make them a version of Sherlock Holmes to solve their problems for them, and we delivered.”

When the other two remained silent, she glanced between, and then continued explaining, nervous.

“Somehow we got access to the real Holmes’ body. We did a scan of his brain. All his memories, all his abilities, his skills – that’s what _you_ are.” She indicated the other.  “Why you’re so good: you’re basically him. With a little bit of editing.”

John blinked hard, trying to get his mind to wrap around it. “Why a woman?”

Dr. Havisham shrugged and wiped at her nose. “Part of the order from upstairs. They thought that level of difference would make it less likely to provoke any suspicious circumstances. Client saying the wrong sort of thing.”

“Wouldn’t do to have anyone saying something to me about ‘the real Sherlock Holmes’,” the other woman filled in for her, smoothly. “That might upset me.”

Dr. Havisham winced. “Yeah. There’s security features in play, part of the framework, to keep you from thinking about any discrepancies too hard. But it’s a bad idea for any Active’s perception of reality to be directly challenged.”

“Active?”

“Well, that’s what we call the body they go into. We don’t grow that part in a _lab_. There’s a couple dozen of them on-site and we pick the one that seems right for each engagement.” The doctor’s voice grew sharper. “That’s the reason they’re chasing you, you realize. It’s not just about keeping this quiet. That’s Rossum property you’re in and they want it back.”

There was a beat before the other woman replied. John watched her face searchingly but whatever he expected to see as a result of being told she was the result of computer programming, it wasn’t there. Her expression was a blank.

“Pity for them,” she said, “that I have no intention of complying.”

Dr. Havisham made a disbelieving, hysterical sound. “Maybe you aren’t getting it. You think you’re real, but you’re _not_. There’s no reason for you to run, because you’re not being held prisoner or whatever it is you’re thinking. You’re _fake_. There is no such person as Amalthea Sherlock Holmes.”

“Yes there is,” the individual in question disagreed. John noticed her hands working into fists, but other than that, she stood still and tall. “You said it yourself. I have all the memories and thoughts, the mind of someone who is very real.”

She took another step back, giving her alleged creator a dismissive, almost condescending look.

“What I am, what has always defined me, is my mind, my intellect. I need nothing else.”

And with that said, she turned and walked out the door without looking back.

By the time it occurred to John what’d happened and he got up to look for her in the hallway, there was no sign of where she’d gone.

*

Once she was alone Vicki crawled to her feet and got to one of the sinks. Lightheaded as she was she needed to clutch the basin for support, but she was able to stand. She washed her face, carefully, and prodded at her nose. She couldn’t tell if it was broken or not; all she knew was that it _hurt_.

After taking a moment to clear her head and catch her breath, she pulled out her cell phone, only to discover she had no service. She cursed.

The door swung open behind her again and she jumped.

Turning around, she was positively agog to see John Watson standing there.

“Well, there’s no sign of her,” he declared. His breathlessness made it likely he’d run the entire length of the floor they were on, looking.

Vicki didn’t really know what to say. So she just stared at him. After a moment, he shrugged.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Um, yeah. Think so,” Vicki told him. “I’ll probably get another doctor to take a look at me – no offense. But I should be fine. Thanks for checking.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

He started to turn to go but then he paused, and fixed her with a considering look. “What you just said. Everything. There, uh, isn’t any chance that you were just-”

“Telling her what she wanted to hear?” Vicki finished for him. She shook her head and wiped at her nose again. “I’m not a psychiatrist,” she gave a weak ironic chuckle, “but I’d think someone crazy enough to believe they were a completely different person would be pretty dangerous to play along with. Wouldn’t you?”

“Right,” Dr. Watson said, slowly. For another moment he stayed where he was, a deeply contemplative expression on his face. Finally he gave a forced smile, and a very strained laugh.

“Well, I think I had better get going,” he remarked. “Considering what I now know about your employers, I don’t think I _really_ want to be around when they inevitably show…guessing things wouldn’t go too well for me.”

“Probably not,” Vicki told him, since after everything else she’d given up, she figured she’d no reason to be anything but honest.

Dr. Watson gave a slow, stiff nod. But for some reason he still couldn’t seem to leave. Not just yet. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and then finally managed to force out whatever words he’d been thinking.

“She really has all of his memories?”

“Not just memories,” Vicki stressed. “His feelings, too. All of it.” Her head spun dizzyingly and she leaned forward over the sink, eyes squeezing shut. Bitterly, she couldn’t help from grumbling out, “Because Bickerton is a _lazy bastard_.”

“Sorry?” Dr. Watson asked, sounding very confused.

Vicki gave a funny snort and figured, why not? After all it was directly because of Bickerton she’d run all over London and been kicked in the face by a crazed Active. She might as well rant to _somebody_.

“My coworker,” she explained. She pulled herself away from the basin, rubbing absently at her forehead. “I’m not the only programmer at the Dollhouse. There are two of us and the jobs are split between. Amalthea wasn’t one of mine, she was Bickerton’s. And that sot made a complete mess of things.”

“What do you mean? What did he do?”

Vicki gave as much of a shake of her head as she dared.

“You’re _never_ supposed to pull too much from one person when you’re making an imprint. Even on a job like this. But that’s practically all Bickerton _did_.” It felt a strange relief, to finally tell someone the awful discovery she’d made as she looked at that flashing screen. “He copied everything over from the original file we had on Sherlock, tweaked the memories just enough she’d identify with that body, threaded in the security features, and hey presto. He considered it a job done.” There was a beat, and then she felt obligated to add: “Arse.”

Dr. Watson was quiet for a while, probably trying to take all that in.

Eventually he asked her, in a careful sort of way, “What would _you_ have done differently? If it was your job, I mean?”

Vicki scoffed. “Given her a completely different backstory before she got to London, for a start,” she said, easily. “Made certain she wouldn’t identify so strongly with the real one’s life. Gone back in and dumbed her down a bit too – I mean, she’d be a genius to start with, yeah? Who would notice?” She tugged at her lip between teeth absently, thinking. “Probably make it so she was a touch less observant of everything. I mean, in that scenario, that kind of attention to detail was only asking for trouble.”

At first Dr. Watson was silent. He breathed in, and when Vicki turned her head she discovered he was giving her a grim look of disgust.

“You really have no sympathy at all, do you?” he demanded.

Vicki blinked, and then she narrowed her eyes at him, surprised and affronted.

“Look, I understand that this might be really hard for you, I do,” she told him, intently. “But she _isn’t_ your friend.”

John Watson gazed at her with his mouth set in a thin line.

“Right,” he replied tersely, wry, “because obviously, you’re the expert.”

He finally left, after that.

Not sure what else to do Vicki hung her throbbing face over the sink again and moaned. She needed an iron capsule. And maybe a bloody aspirin.

*

John was practically all the way back to his apartment before he even realized it. He was so deep in his thoughts he couldn’t see a thing in front of him.

Hell, he was surprised his head wasn’t about to explode, his mind was racing and circling itself so hard.

The story, the explanation, he had just gotten was completely insane. Some sinister corporation out there made a business of putting fake people out for rent – had gotten their hands on a copy of his best friend’s brain, stuck it in a second body. A body that escaped and found its way back to London.

But the maddest part of all was that he found himself believing it. Found himself thinking that it actually made _sense_.

The female claiming to be Sherlock did things that only he should have been able to, knew things that only he should know. How good would an elaborate imposter have to be to be able to pull that off?

And it explained why John felt like he’d had to listen to her even when reason told him otherwise, been drawn to her against all common sense.

Because some instinct, some sixth sense, had identified that in a way, he really was talking to Sherlock Holmes.

 _Oh god,_ John thought to himself dimly, _it’s finally happened. Every crazy thing I’ve seen and experienced has pushed me past the brink._

With perfect timing, as if to save him from himself, his mobile began to ring. John fumbled to pull it out of his pocket and his nerves twitched as he saw it read ‘ _number unknown’_.

“Sherlock?” he answered, pressing it to his ear, and was mildly distressed to realize he was equally expecting to hear the voice of one of two people when he asked that question.

“Oh good, you’re still alive,” said the voice on the other end – male – flatly. John let out a sigh as some of his tension eased. “I can’t talk too long. Just wanted to check in.” There were distant voices in the background, sounds of traffic; payphone, then. “Also to let you know I took down the message the hacker left on my website. Minor aggravation, really, but still tiresome.”

“It wasn’t a hacker,” John told him. The words felt leaden as they spilled slowly from his tongue. “It was her.”

The reality was finally beginning to hit him all the way and it was making him feel like he was up to his knees in quicksand; unable to move, and overcome by an alarming sinking feeling.

“Alright,” Sherlock drawled, carefully. “Well, we already knew that was a possibility.”

“No,” John blurted. “No, it isn’t – christ, I don’t even know what I’m saying. But I’m saying it anyway. Sherlock, she’s real. She’s…actually you.”

He counted to three in the pause that followed before Sherlock responded. “Say that again.”

“Amalthea. She isn’t crazy. Or if she is, then so am I. Which, to be fair, I guess I can’t really rule it out right now, but-”

“John, I have maybe less than two minutes before I have to hang up this phone. Please say something useful. Have you been drugged?”

“No!” Both as a result of Sherlock’s hurrying and his own intensity, he began talking rapidly. “Look, I’m going to have to try and explain it all later, when there’s more time, but she wasn’t the only one I ran into at St. Bart’s. That doctor was there too, only it turns out she doesn’t work at some private psychiatric clinic – she works at a secret facility that would probably put whatever the hell they were doing at Baskerville to shame.”

John drew a breath, quick, more like a hiss so Sherlock wouldn’t try interrupting. “Amalthea is an exact copy of you. She’s your brain, stuck inside another body; it’s in there, the whole thing. She thinks she’s you because in a way she _is_.”

Another three second pause. Which to someone who thought at the rate Sherlock did, was the equivalent of a lengthy silence.

“In order for that to be possible,” he said at length, piecing it out, “they would’ve needed to get a brain scan during the interval I was playing dead.”

“Yeah,” John agreed, trying not to sound too eager Sherlock was following along.

An odd note came into Sherlock’s voice. Harder. “They _stole_ me.”

“…Yeah,” John said again though this time with far less enthusiasm.

He could hear Sherlock breathing at a perfectly even pace. “I find that,” he declared at last, toneless, “to be very distressing.”

John managed to stop himself before he said something useless, like _‘I’m sorry’_.

“Obviously, this is all very interesting,” Sherlock continued, more musingly. “Very, very interesting. I don’t have time at this moment to allow myself to fully examine or absorb the implications in their entirety.”

There was an interruption, a voice in the background – John heard Sherlock bite out a very impatient _‘Yes, yes, hang on,’_ before he came back again.

“We’ll continue this discussion tonight. I’ll meet you at home.”

And then, of course, he hung up without another word. Certainly without saying goodbye.

John stared at his mobile flatly for a moment, before finally putting it away again. ‘Home’ – by that Sherlock meant their old flat.

It was only with a slightly dejected sigh that John turned around and started walking again now in the opposite direction he had been heading.

It took him half an hour to get to Baker Street. The front door was open – he called out to Mrs. Hudson as he let himself in. John stuck his head inside her apartment and was puzzled to find her in her kitchen, with both the blender and the electric mixer running as well as her television turned up very loud.

“Mrs. Hudson?” he had to practically yell to make himself heard. “What are you doing?”

She glanced towards him with a strange, conspiring smile. “Oh, hello John,” she said cheerfully, acting as if oblivious to how much she had to raise her voice. “What a nice surprise, this!”

She did not sound at all surprised, either. As John gazed at her in befuddlement she lifted her eyes toward the ceiling, nodded, and then winked. “I expect you’ll be hanging around for a bit tonight. Maybe want to go upstairs, have a look around for old time’s sake?”

Slowly it began to dawn on John what she was doing. “Er, yeah. Probably,” he played along. “In fact, think I’ll go do that right now.”

Mrs. Hudson waved at him as he went towards the stairs. “I’ll bring you tea in a minute, dear. If you like!” she shouted.

As John got away from the din she was making in 221A, he was finally able to hear what she was covering up: the playing of a violin.

But that didn’t quite make sense. True, he didn’t know where Sherlock had been calling from, but he wouldn’t have expected him to make it to Baker Street so soon after…

The solution dawned on him the instant his hand closed around the doorknob and he stepped inside. But by then it was too late. The physical proof of the answer was already staring him right in the face.

The female Sherlock stood in the middle of the flat, eyes closed as the bow raked back and forth across the instrument tucked securely beneath her chin with a kind of violent elegance. A familiar set of pajamas and blue dressing-gown hung in a slightly askance manner off her frame. There was an opened package of cigarettes on the table, the ashtray stolen from Buckingham Palace beside it with what looked to be three extinguished butts.

John was fairly certain he didn’t make a sound, but she abruptly stopped playing.

“Hello again, John,” she greeted him, perfectly matter-of-fact. Then she stopped, and took a more careful look at his face.

“Oh,” she deduced quickly. “I wasn’t the one you were expecting.”


	6. The Tale of Two Sherlocks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to my friends on plurk for looking over this chapter and catching my errors for me as well as offering encouragement, and doing the same for all the chapters previous, as well as probably those in the foreseeable future.

Even though he knew it was very clichéd, not to mention unproductive of him John couldn’t help it that for a solid beat of time all he did was stare.

The female version of Sherlock was of course not so patient. She blinked at John exactly once, somehow conveying her desire for him to say something instead of standing there gaping uselessly, before giving an almost silent sigh of repressed annoyance.

“Whenever you’re finished, you might want to close the door behind you.”

“Oh! Ah.” That woke John up, reminding him all at once that neither of them were supposed to be there, and the flat was supposed to be unoccupied, and the building had other tenants. “Right.”

He turned around and made sure the entrance was closed firmly, locking it out of more habit than necessity.

When he looked back, the female Sherlock was standing in the same place, head turned so she gazed at John from an angle, coolly. The violin was still dangling from her hands and she was still wearing Sherlock’s pajamas and _oh god_ it was really coming home to John just how very complicated things were about to get.

“What are you _doing_ here?” John demanded, squeezing his eyes tight and shaking his head to clear it, as he tried to string the right questions together. “I mean, if I’m understanding things right you’ve got people after you, so why-”

“They hardly stand a likelier chance of thinking to look for me here rather than anywhere else,” she replied, calm. “Besides, I have a lot to mull over. I preferred to do that in an atmosphere I knew to be properly conducive.”

Her eyes wandered, taking in the flat with scrutiny – no doubt noticing the many signs of neglect and disarray, but John couldn’t tell if she was bothered by that, and if so how much. “I needed… _comfort_.”

“Familiarity,” John said quietly, gathering what she was trying to say.

Sherlock nodded – and John realized he suddenly wasn’t having trouble anymore thinking of her as ‘Sherlock’.

It was the flat. It was seeing her standing there, surrounded by that ugly wallpaper with the skull and the harpoon and the bullet-holes visible over her shoulder. Watching her play the violin, wearing that dressing-gown, even if it didn’t fit her quite right.

The similarity in her words and movements had been telling before. With the setting of 221B as a backdrop, it became impossible to deny.

 _Steady,_ John had to tell himself, because there was a lightness in his head and he was having trouble feeling anything below his knees. He was still struggling to come to terms with it all, and at least part of his psyche was threatening a conniption fit over it.

On the outside however he probably looked merely blank. His eyes wandered to the ashtray, the tiny plume rising from the one lit cigarette propped on the edge.

“You’re smoking,” he noted, flatly.

“Yes, well.” Sherlock’s mouth twitched, wry, and she reached for the cigarette. “In my defense, I have had a rather trying day.”

John had to laugh his agreement to that. He watched as she took a deep drag and then exhaled in a manner that let the smoke float back over her face, enveloping her. It was like the nicotine itself wasn’t enough; she wanted the scent of it to seep into every pore.

“I have to say though,” he found himself remarking, in an odd tone of voice, “all things considered, you seem to be taking this…pretty well. I mean: you just found out today that you’re basically a copy of someone else that was put together by a computer.” He gestured with both hands, trying to put it into words.

“How are you _not_ more… _upset_ right now?”

She tilted her head at him, cigarette still propped between two fingers – and John couldn’t help noticing she held it straighter and closer to the knuckles than most women would. That programmer had been right; they hadn’t changed very much at all.

“There’s really not much to be ‘upset’ about, as you put it,” she explained to him, matter-of-fact. “The most significant part of me is and has always been my intellect. So what does it matter, what it’s been put into, or that this may not have been the way that it always was? That is unimportant. Immaterial.” She shrugged, lips briefly curling in dismissal, and knocked some ashes off into the glass. “Besides, what good would _panicking_ , or letting myself sink into some dramatic existential morass do? Absolutely none.”

She looked at John again. “So. If there’s no point in it, then why bother?”

John felt an ironic grin come onto his face. “Spoken like a true, well… _you_.”

Not a single other human being he knew of would be able to stare at an oncoming emotional reaction to something, decide it was illogical, and therefore simply shrug it off.

Her face was still composed but something about the way she looked at John became much more focused. “So you do believe me, now,” she observed. “That I am who I say I am.”

If it had ever stopped, the tone in the room went back to being serious. More tense.

“I…yeah.” John had to wipe a hand quickly across his face and take a breath before he continued. “I believe it. I mean, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, and on some level I’m keeping an eye out, looking for holes, or more proof, or something; I’m not even sure, really. But yes.”

He nodded, looking her straight in the eye, committed. “Right now, with everything I’ve seen and heard, my first instinct is to trust you. That you are…Sherlock.” He floundered a bit for something more to say, and thus it probably sounded more weak than it did inspiring when he concluded, nodding again, “And so, that’s it, then. That’s what I’ve decided to go on with.”

It was funny, really, that Sherlock always talked about the importance of only trusting in things that’d been borne out by science and logic. And yet it was while dealing with things regarding him that John found himself relying the _most_ on what had no logic at all.

Every time Sherlock reached out a hand and asked him to do something, asked him to go somewhere or put his own life on the line, John did it, instantly, instinctively. Because he trusted Sherlock. It didn’t matter what explanation he might try to pin on it later, when he looked back and had the time. In the moment, that’s all it ever was. Trust.

In the present, Sherlock’s eyes grew less hardened, and she nodded. She straightened her shoulders and breathed out through her nose.

“I’m glad,” she told John in reply, simple, honest.

It felt like a weight lifting off them both.

Sherlock went to put her cigarette back down, and John stood there trying to deal with the curious numb feeling that came while trying to absorb that his best friend was currently two whole separate people.

And then he recalled what brought him to the flat in the first place.

“You’ll probably want to put that out, though,” he had to say, pointing. “Before he…” He stopped and then quickly started again: “By the way, and I really can’t believe I’m even saying this, but _you’re_ going to be here in probably about, oh – fifteen, twenty minutes. The other version, of you, I mean-”

He stopped himself before going ‘the real one’, because even if that’s what he was saying in his mind, it wasn’t a stretch to see how offensive that’d be.

“I know,” she responded simply.

“That’s right,” John remembered, thinking back to a few minutes before. “You did.” He swallowed, already bracing for it. “How did…how did you know?”

“It was Victoria who first brought up that there was another version, you recall. The original one, the one which my ‘imprint’, as she put it, was built off of,” Sherlock explained.

“Okay,” John said slowly, “yeah.”

Sherlock gave a minute shrug, and her voice took on a briefly confessional tone. “Actually, I have to admit that I’m a little relieved, because when the possibility was first brought up I was initially concerned that my attempt at faking my death had failed, and they were given access to my brain after I’d died.” She exhaled, brushing it off. “But, fortunately that fear was assuaged by the fact of you turning up.”

“Sorry?” John asked, the dryness that’d come into his mouth over hearing Sherlock briefly thought she might’ve been dead causing some difficulty even as his confusion snapped him out of it. “What? What do I have to do with anything?”

“Oh, a great deal, John, as always,” she told him in that confident and genial tone John could never decide whether or not it was mocking. It was slightly weird hearing it in a female voice, but still very recognizable. “As soon as I saw you when you opened that door, it all began to come together. Why would you _be_ here, in the early evening, when you may have other things to do?”

The violin had been set down on the nearby coffee table but the bow was still in her hand, and she made a few flicking gestures with it as she spoke.

“A visit for old times’ sake, maybe, nostalgic recollection. But no, that wasn’t the way you were acting, when you came in. You had the air of a man with a purpose. And so with that all the pieces fell into place. The way you were shocked but not _outraged_ when I very first approached you; the way you had abruptly stopped mourning as evidenced by your tone on your blog.”

“You got an abrupt cessation of mourning from the way I mentioned the shopping and what TV programs I watched?” John demanded with halfhearted skepticism. He wasn’t at all surprised when she kept talking and ignored him.

“The conclusion was that my counterpart didn’t die after all but successfully went into hiding. And for the last three months, you’ve been in on it. Spending time with him, I’d say, if not actively assisting him in keeping up the ruse.”

John shook his head, the amused, incredulous half-grin coming to his face once more. “Right. Splendid. Well done – as always, I suppose.”

He really didn’t know what else to say.

Sherlock smiled in the way that seemed the usual response to John’s compliments, both smug and placated at once, mouth curving broadly and the corners of her eyes crinkling.

John reminded himself that muscle memory was a _thing_ , and then firmly instructed his brain not to think about it too hard.

She reached for her cigarette and placed it at her mouth once more. John was about to protest but then she took in a long, impossibly deep breath, so much that with most people he would’ve expected them to be gasping - and he realized she was taking what had to be a final hit even as his own mouth parted for a sound of alarm that he needed to forcibly silence.

“There,” Sherlock said after she’d shrouded her entire body in transparent fog, and jabbed it out in the ashtray with a punctuating air of finality. “Done.”

“Great.” John picked up the ashtray, already following some vague plan to toss the remnants out the window. “I don’t know who we think we’re fooling, mind; the whole place reeks like a cigar bar,” he had to comment.

Sherlock made an absent sound that could’ve been agreement. She picked up the violin again but instead of using the bow she plucked at the strings with her fingertips, expression set in contemplation.

Returning from the window, John watched her. “So, you’ll be staying here, then?”

“Of course,” she replied, dismissive. “Where else?”

John licked his lower lip, frowning. “Well it’s not exactly up for guests. I mean, the heat’s not even on and…where were you staying before now?” he belatedly wondered out loud.

Sherlock stopped with her hand poised right above the violin, gaze going off at an angle as if listening to the echoes of sound. “Rotten motel.”

“Ah,” John said, the inflection in that single syllable conveying all it needed. Namely, he now agreed with her decision to stay in the chilly half-vacant shell of the flat completely, because he wasn’t in any form complacent with her going back to the alternative.

Sherlock went stiff – John was reminded of the poise a birddog took on, attuned to some far-off rustle, and the comparison turned out to be entirely apt as she lowered the violin with an abrupt pronouncement of, “I’m on my way. Bottom of the stairs.”

And they both knew what she meant by ‘ _I’m_ ’.

“That was quick,” John remarked purposelessly, glancing at his watch. He looked back at her, couldn’t read her face, and decided he was better off not even trying. “Right. I’m gonna go and give him the heads-up, then.” It came out sounding like a question – not because it was one, but because John was trying to muddle through and not feel overwhelmed.

She made a drawn-out sound of distracted agreement that built to a murmur of, “Probably a good idea.”

John glanced at her, took a nod and a breath to steady himself, and then went for the door.

He wasn’t sure if the feeling he had counted as a form of déjà vu when he was standing at the top of the stairs and looked down to watch Sherlock – the other one, the first one, the real one, the male one, whatever – climbing up them. He moved with purposeful, silent swiftness, hands in the pockets of his coat, and he noticed John waiting for him, giving a steady questioning look.

John pushed the door to 221B shut behind him, leaning against it as he addressed Sherlock. The other man stopped so close that John almost touched him when he held one hand up, palm flat towards Sherlock’s chest in a ‘wait a moment’ gesture.

“Right, so,” John tried to speak quietly, and evenly, and also fast. “Fair warning. Ah – you’re already _here_.”

“What?” Sherlock’s brows knit together in puzzlement, but before John could say another word his expression transitioned to realization. “ _Oh_. Well that’s…slightly unanticipated.” He paused, thinking, quickly questioning, “Why come here?”

“Apparently she needed a good place to think,” John answered slowly, trying to keep the utter bemusement out of his voice.

“Yes, of course,” Sherlock said, mulling that over. “Given the circumstances, that makes perfect sense.”

 _‘Given the circumstances?’_ John thought but didn’t say, and also, _‘Nothing about this really makes any sense.’_

But no, of course Sherlock would perfectly understand his counterpart’s motivations without needing further explanation. All he had to do was think of how _he’d_ act in that position.

He gave John another fixated, questioning look. “What’s she like?”

John had no clue how to answer that. “What’s she _like?_ ” He stared at Sherlock blankly for a beat, before finally offering, pointed, “She’s like you.”

“Well, yes. Obviously,” Sherlock muttered.

From within the flat drifted the sound of music being played steadily on a violin. Sherlock tilted his head, eyes going to the ceiling in unfocused thought as he listened, intently. His face was impossible to read.

John stood there because he didn’t know what next to do or say. After maybe half a minute, Sherlock turned to the door, purposeful, reaching past him for the knob. John shifted out the way lest he be shoved over.

“Right,” John murmured, following close in the other man’s wake. “Best get on with it, then."

The violin music had stopped. John stayed by the door, looking up to find Sherlock – the first one, or the second to arrive tonight, or _whichever_ – had made his way in far enough that the pair were standing apart about the length of the sofa, and they were looking at one another with scrutiny.

There was a pause. “Hello,” the female Sherlock finally said.

“Evening,” the male one replied. They continued eyeing one another – it was making John oddly tired watching that amount of silent intensity. “Well now.”

“This is…curious,” the female Sherlock commented.

“Very,” the male Sherlock agreed.

With the barest of motions, a flick of an eyeball, a tilt of a head, they looked each other up and down, noting every detail. They didn’t _quite_ mirror one other in movement, but it was close enough to be eerie to witness. John watched as Sherlock and – _Amalthea_ , he remembered; she had a different name. And thank god for that, else he’d have to label them as Sherlock One and Sherlock Two, like something out of a demented children’s story.

He watched as Sherlock and Amalthea each took one slight step to their respective rights, gaze never leaving their opposite. They half-circled one another.

“Strange,” Sherlock eventually stated, words drawn out slowly. “Very…strange.” He stopped moving, and so did she, and he pronounced, “I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”

“Neither have I,” Amalthea responded, and then her mouth twisted in a smile.

So did Sherlock’s. They shared a chuckle over that.

“Oh, _good._ The two of you are getting along then,” John had to say. “Because when this sort of thing comes up in science fiction the alternative is usually one of you tries to kill the other.”

“Jury’s still out,” Amalthea said, flippant. Sherlock made a sound of agreement.

John winced. “ _Please_ don’t joke about that,” he begged, voice momentarily weary. “Really.”

They both favored him with a glance before going back to staring at the other. “So we share every memory in common up until the fall,” Sherlock gathered, questioning her.

“Yes,” Amalthea answered. “The next months are all in bits and pieces, short periods of actual recollection surrounded by false memories implanted. Easily distinguishable from the others at a glance: there is a significant _lack_ of any real feature. Insufficient discrepancies.”

“Yes; of course, of course,” Sherlock murmured. They were both pacing a little by now, aimless. Sherlock had his hands pressed together in front of him, fingers spread, while Amalthea had her hands on her hips. “No program, no matter how clever, would be able to inscribe such a high level of detail.”

“And this one _isn’t_ very clever,” Amalthea quipped, sardonic. “At least not from personal experience.”

Sherlock opened his mouth, paused, and then sniffed the air. He turned to look at her. “What’d you do with the rest of the pack?”

“Hid them,” she assured him – and then her expression faltered as she realized the problem.

Reaching the same thought, probably, Sherlock pointed at her with a grim smile. “Bet I can guess where within five tries.”

“I’d be shocked if it were more than three,” she said pensively, frowning.

“Excuse me,” John interrupted. He laughed wanly, rubbing at his temple. “And, it occurs to me that I’m probably going to be saying many things twice from here on.” He pointed at Sherlock. “How are you _not_ bothered by this? I mean - maybe I’m reading things wrong, but on the phone you sounded pretty put out. I seem to recall the use of the word ‘stolen’.”

“Stole,” Sherlock corrected him, precisely. John just gave him a _look_. “Well, yes,” he offered, sounding mildly confused John even felt the need to ask, “but not by her.”

“Yes,” Amalthea agreed in a similar tone – a bit more confident, likely because she was in effect backed up by somebody. “If either of us finds it necessary to feel wronged over this, there’s no reason to direct it towards each other. We aren’t the offending parties here, Rossum and their ‘Dollhouse’ are.”

“Dollhouse?” Sherlock repeated, giving a curious look.

“That would be the place where they make the copies of the inside of people’s heads,” John explained. He walked between the two of them, looking around. “While we endeavor to fill you in, somebody best tell me where the _dreaded smokes_ have been hidden.”

“Ah, right,” Amalthea remembered. She exchanged a look with Sherlock.

His eyebrows went up. “Behind the broken corner in the bookcase?” he guessed.

She shook her head. “Under the base of that awful lamp that was a reward from the sheik.”

John went to retrieve the pack while Sherlock pulled a face and made of a sound of disappointment. “Ah! That would have been my _second_ guess,” he complained.

“Yes, it was my second thought as well,” Amalthea noted. “That’s why I went _there_ instead.”

“Wonderful,” John said glibly, eyes on the pack of cigarettes he turned over in his hand. “The two of you can play chess against one another.”

He meant it entirely as a joke but they both made a sound of realization, eyes locking as they looked noticeably excited. John went still and thought, _‘Oh god, what have I done?’_

Amalthea waved a hand, though, forcing herself to focus. “It can wait.”

“Right,” Sherlock agreed. “For the moment we should be discussing our adversaries - especially since they will no doubt be coming after you.”

“Of course,” she said with an acerbic flippancy. “They can’t let me continue to run the risk of exposing their secrets, not to mention cutting into their profit margins.”

He looked puzzled but only for a moment, eyes lighting with understanding. “Ahh. _Renting out_ the world’s foremost and only consulting detective,” he realized coldly. “How lucratively-minded of them. Very clever.”

“Yes,” Amalthea responded in the same harsh, empty tone. “You can see why I took objection.”

“Who wouldn’t?” John asked rhetorically, feeling rather grim himself.

While they were speaking Sherlock had noticed where Amalthea left her coat and scarf draped over the back of one of the chairs. He went over and lifted at the fabric of one sleeve, giving it a quizzical look. John could see why he was bemused, and almost laughed – it was the same bloody coat. The only thing different was that it had been tailored a bit to fit better around her slighter frame.

“Careful,” Amalthea told Sherlock, offhand. “There’s a gun in there.”

“Oh,” Sherlock noted.

“What?” John broke in, more than a little alarmed by this revelation. He stepped closer. “Hang on. Just a minute, since _when?_ ”

Amalthea blinked at him, thinking. “Thursday.”

“Took it off one of the security team they had pursuing you?” Sherlock gathered, looking at her for confirmation. She nodded.

“Speaking of them, now seems as good a time as any to mention,” she stated. “It’s highly likely that Rossum is aware that you’re still alive.”

“ _Do_ they?” He paused, absorbing that. “Not good.”

“How on earth did you get that?” John demanded in bewilderment.

“When Victoria was talking about their having scanned his brain,” Amalthea explained. “She made a point of using the word ‘body’, and she glanced at you while she did it. She was clearly nervous.”

“Overcompensating,” Sherlock deduced out loud. “I see.”

“Yes,” Amalthea drawled. “She isn’t a very good liar.”

John decided to skip right past the part where he still wasn’t entirely sure what they were talking about. “So, these people, Rossum or whoever, they know that Sherlock – the _first_ Sherlock – is still alive, but they don’t know that _I_ know?”

“Precisely.”

That time they _both_ said it. At the exact same moment, turning in the exact same way, and with identical inflection in their voices. There was a beat as Sherlock and Amalthea turned away from John to look at each other and John stared at them both.

“ _Excellent_ ,” John finally had to break the silence with a kind of desperate sarcasm. “ _That’s_ starting. Next I expect you’ll probably be communicating telepathically.”

“A literal version of that would be impossible,” Amalthea muttered contemplatively, distracted, as she examined Sherlock’s face with half-lidded scrutiny. “Though we do share thoughts, in a manner of speaking.”

“Or rather, we share patterns of thinking,” Sherlock chimed in, eyeing her carefully.

Neither of them said anything, at first. And then all of a sudden Sherlock abruptly began to ask, “What was-?”

“Blue,” Amalthea answered, just as swift, before he could even finish the question.

“Oh,” Sherlock squinted at her, pleased, “you _are_ good.”

“Naturally,” she replied with a faint smirk. “What else would you expect?” He grinned smugly.

John let out a silent breath as his eyes went to the ceiling.

“Okay. You know, I think the two of you can probably fill each other in on whatever you need. I’m gonna go downstairs.”

He didn’t bother glancing back to see if they even noticed as he left.

“Oh, John!” Back on the ground floor, he met a surprised Mrs. Hudson at the door to her flat, holding a tray with two cups of tea on it. “I thought you would still be upstairs.”

John forced an awkward smile. “Yeah. Thing is, it’s a bit… _crowded_ up there right now,” he explained carefully. “So if it’s alright with you, I thought I might just stay down here for a bit.”

Mrs. Hudson stepped back to let him in. She clucked her tongue with a note of understanding.

“Let me guess,” she sighed, barely remembering to continue phrasing things as if they were hypotheticals, “someone’s talking to themselves.”

John couldn’t help that he let out a short bark of laughter. He cleared his throat to cover it.

“Yeah, uh, you could say that.”

*

Living almost entirely in one’s own mind had both its advantages and disadvantages.

It was easy to shrug off physical needs. Things like hunger and sleep became petty distractions, easily ignored if not forgotten altogether with thoughts entwined in much more interesting and important matters.

Sherlock usually sufficed on about five hours of sleep a night, if not less, and when on a case she wouldn’t sleep at all. Before John had entered her life she could forget to eat for days.

But even if the body was no more than a well-tuned machine existing to carry the mind from place to place, every once in a while it needed more than the bare minimum to function. It needed to be taken down for maintenance.

She hadn’t stopped to rest since she’d gotten away from Rossum. It had been three days. Adrenaline and willpower could get her very far, but even _her_ brain was still only mortal.

Even as she went around and around in her thoughts she could feel them starting to fray at the edges. Her system was beginning to make feeble complaints. She could keep pushing, keep going – but from experience she knew it was better to give in.

Besides, after everything she had been through, she probably deserved a short break.

Things would fall into place more clearly in the morning. She’d be able to approach them from a fresh perspective and with new energy.

Sherlock got up from the corner of the sofa she had spent the past few hours curled up in deep in contemplation. She went to the small desk crammed into the space between John’s bedroom and the kitchen and started rifling through the papers stuffed inside its drawers.

Between experiments, enemies, and maybe half a dozen other reasons, one might never know what would come in handy. That’s why scattered throughout the flat were a few small hidden stashes of drugs, mostly sedatives.

She found the plastic baggie containing the pills she was looking for. After a second of consideration she pulled out one, the put the rest back where she found them.

The problem with sleeping when she was in the middle of something, and would frankly rather be thinking instead, was that she had to force her brain and body into cooperating. Otherwise both were trained into never giving her a moment of peace.

She crossed back into the sitting room area, one hand resting against the wall. Her male counterpart sat in his armchair with hands clasped before his face, staring straight ahead with features fixed in a look of concentration.

They had spent she didn’t know how much time talking, her filling him in on everything she knew about Rossum and what was going on, both of them drawing several joint conclusions. They compared notes, mostly about what he had been doing in the time immediately after his faked demise.

It was a strange experience talking to someone who absorbed detail at the rate she did, for a change – exciting but exhausting.

And then eventually they had run out of things to converse about. Abruptly, in silent consensus, they had retreated to their separate corners to mull over the existence of the other, among other things. Since she had taken the sofa he went to the armchair.

(Maybe about half an hour ago he had asked, suddenly, “When did John leave?”

“Don’t know.” She shrugged one shoulder, having perceived the absence of the other a short time before – probably the same as he had. “I didn’t notice him going either.”)

She considered him for a space of three slow breathes, watching him – wondering if he was in deep enough he couldn’t see her standing there, or if he could feel her eyes on him, able to multitask perfectly the way she often could.

“Are you going to be needing the bed?” she asked finally, breaking in with perfect calmness, as if they continued speaking all this time instead of taking a several-hours’ break in their conversation.

He blinked once, rapid, and lowered his hands but didn’t turn to look at her, at least at first. “No.”

“Good. I’ll be taking it, then.”

She went to the door separating them from her bedroom – also _his_ bedroom, she’d realized, which made things complicated and a bit irritating and was why she had felt the need to ask. Her back was to him when she held the pill up in her left hand, securely between her forefinger and thumb.

“I need sleep,” was the only explanation she gave, and without having to look she knew he understood her.

Just like, without looking, she knew he was nodding. “Go on then. I expect we’ll see each other in the morning.”

He’d no intention of leaving Baker Street in the midst of all this excitement and danger. She wouldn’t have either, were she in his place.

And that was another reason she had decided she could allow herself rest: while she was asleep, he would still be awake, still thinking and turning over the puzzles in his brain. She didn’t have to worry about missing out on valuable time, about things not getting done, because he would still be awake and doing them.

Without turning the light on she padded into the bedroom. The dark made no difference in such a familiar space. She undressed, dry-swallowed the sleeping pill, and threw herself face-first down onto the mattress.

Within less than a minute, probably, she was dead to the world and at peace.

*

After one and a half cups of tea and an hour of nice if somewhat awkward chat with Mrs. Hudson, John had left and gone back to his home, for at least a few hours of rest.

He was back early in the morning though, trying to be quiet as he left himself in and once more climbed up the stairs.

Trying _not_ to think about Sherlock Holmes was an endeavor he knew to give up on, at the best of times. Especially at present with him knowing he had not one but two of them to worry about.

All was silence as he came in. The flat was still a mess but it was the cluttered mess he was familiar with by now, and at a glance it didn’t look like anything had been disturbed. A single lamp was on, the bulb giving off a hazy light that struggled to fight the shadows off all by itself.

Sherlock – the male one, the first one – was sitting in his armchair, knees apart but ankles close together. He had his violin in one hand, end of it resting against his shoulder, bow in the other but was not currently playing it. The heady look in his eyes meant he’d probably been sitting there all night.

Half the time John would need to go over and wake him from his ‘trance’ before he could expect to get any response. But this time Sherlock greeted him without looking.

“Morning already?” he asked carelessly, head moving in John’s general direction without breaking his far-off gaze.

“Yeah. Funny how that tends to happen,” John answered, just as even. “Sun goes down, turns to night, and then a new day starts right on schedule same as it always does.”

Sherlock breathed out through his nose in not-quite-a-snort, lips flattening together. It could’ve just as easily meant “ _Very amusing, John,”_ as it could have “ _You’re being tedious”._

John looked around. Saw nothing of note, and went back to looking at Sherlock. He licked around the edges of his own mouth.

“You okay?” he asked the other finally, soft. “Everything here…you’re doing alright?”

Sherlock’s eyes became focused again in time for him to turn his face towards John. “Of course,” he said mildly. “Why do you ask?”

John gave a strange, strained chuckle. “Less than twenty-four hours ago you found out you’ve basically been cloned without your consent. That some…sinister corporation built another version of you, practically alike in every single way, that thought it was the _real_ you and they’ve been using it as a slave.” He shrugged, his voice completely flat. “I don’t know, Sherlock. I get you’re not like most people, but I really don’t think I’d blame you if for once you wanted to, maybe, freak out a little.”

“I am coming to terms with it the best I can, in my own way,” Sherlock responded, smoothly. “The circumstances, such as they are, are very unusual and not entirely savory.”

He twirled his violin around by the neck, lowering it, giving the bow a glance. It occurred to John to wonder if, as he was looking at it, he was thinking about how Amalthea had been holding it in _her_ hands the same way. Playing with such careless possession.

“But. Regardless of how she came to be about, our new friend _is_ another me. I’ve observed the proof of that myself. There can be no denying it.” His eyes slid back to fix on John again. “Right now I choose to simply focus on the elements of it that are fascinating. After all, what good would _panic_ do, really?”

John had to smile. “She said almost the exact thing, you know. About panicking.”

Sherlock absorbed that without a flinch. “Of course she did.”

John nodded. And he looked around with curiosity, suddenly acutely aware that the flat appeared to contain exactly half the number of Sherlocks it was supposed to.

“Where is she, anyway?”

“Bed,” Sherlock told him, clipped. John looked at him with surprise.

“She’s _sleeping_?” he demanded, unable to conceal his incredulity that, familiar as he was with the habits and behavioral patterns of Sherlock Holmes, she would be able to pull that off.

Sherlock brought his violin back into position and sawed out a few slow, careful notes. John thought he recognized the opening strains of something he’d heard before, either elsewhere or just listening to Sherlock, but he couldn’t place them.

“Pills help with that,” Sherlock informed him, with the simple frankness he used for commenting on all manner of things.

As soon as John absorbed and realized what he was saying the alarm and disbelief kicked in. He stared at Sherlock with eyes wide and mouth slightly agape.

An entire litany of things ran through his head. That god only knew what kind of ‘pills’ Sherlock was talking about, given his history of keeping decaying body parts in the bread drawer and vials of acid in the cupboard next to the cereal. That it could very well be a mystery how old they were, or what else they might’ve been exposed to, or if they even were _what_ they were supposed to be considering the odds they’d actually been labeled (slim). That, if John understood what the Dollhouse did correctly, then technically Amalthea couldn’t know the true medical history of her body.

But once the moment passed and the shock wore off, John didn’t say any of these things aloud. He knew better. Instead he shook his head with a humorless smile and fought the urge to laugh.

The way Sherlock Holmes thought was logical, cold and efficient, always moving forward on a straight line. He bypassed things normal people would’ve included…sometimes that being _caution_.

So John didn’t waste his breath berating Sherlock. Instead he sighed, and nodded, and went to go check on Amalthea himself.

The lights were off in the bedroom, the curtains drawn. John lingered a moment in the open doorway letting his eyes adjust. From where he stood he could make out a sleeping form mostly covered by the comforter, caught up between tangled sheets. It looked as if she was breathing steadily. John stepped over a pile of clothes on the floor to get closer so he could check her pulse.

She was halfway between lying on her stomach and one side, her face partially covered by splayed black hair. Her limbs were going in about every possible direction.

It was about what John had been expecting from his experiences with Sherlock as a roommate. The few times he could actually be coaxed into a deep slumber, he had a tendency to come a bit undone. _Muscle memory_ , John reminded himself.

Even though he had a perfectly legitimate reason for being there and doing what he was doing, for some reasons John’s movements became very slow. Not only because he didn’t want to disturb her; he was lingering. Every time he’d been around the female Sherlock before she’d been awake and talking at him. He hadn’t had much of a chance to really _look_ at her. Now that she was still, silent, John was having a hard time looking away – it was fascinating and bizarre and sort of mesmerizing, taking in with scrutiny and mentally cataloging all the ways that she was and wasn’t like the Sherlock Holmes he already knew.

John was next to the bed and leaning forward over her prone body, one hand heading towards the side of her throat, when Amalthea’s breathing hitched slightly and she shifted, rolling over.

John froze with arm out above her, mid-reach, staring down as he watched the blanket slip and he couldn’t really look anywhere else and he remembered with horror that he’d stepped over _her clothes_ when he came in, and oh god, what if she wasn’t wearing anything else and—

His moment of sheer terror was cut short when Amalthea ended up on her back, eyes still shut tight and completely unaware of John’s presence or anything else, the comforter falling down past her midsection and revealing a plain white sports bra.

John heaved a deep breath of relief.

He waited for his own heart to stop beating rapidly before he finished what he was doing. Satisfied that it appeared neither of them was going to be having a coronary, at least not today, he resisted the urge to pull the covers back up over her and left, shutting the door behind him.

Sherlock was, unsurprisingly, right where John had last seen him.

He stopped playing and turned to look at John. “All good?”

John nodded. “Seems to be.” He looked at the floorboards, suddenly uncertain what to say. “Look, I need to get to work, so I’d better-”

“John.”

Sherlock had, abruptly, put the violin down and was gazing at him with the kind of focus that John had come to think of as signaling something crucial.

John shifted to one side, apprehensive, so he was standing more directly in front of him. He kept his mouth shut and waited for Sherlock to continue.

“You do understand it, don’t you, John? The way that this is going to have to work.”

John frowned. “What do you mean?”

Sherlock’s gaze moved, coolly pensive. “It isn’t just my memories. She has my perceptions as well. She views the world and the people in it the same way that I do.”

“Yeah,” John said slowly, a question implied. He thought they had been through this all pretty thoroughly by now.

“So, she recalls being through all the same adventures with you. She expects there should be the same level of familiarity, the same relationship.” Sherlock laced his fingers together, elbows on the armrests. “You may be aware of this cognitively, but through your eyes you still feel as if you’re looking at a stranger. Through her eyes, all she sees when she looks at you is her friend.”

He peered at John again. “She might understand the reasons of course, but if you aren’t careful, if you behave too distantly with her, it would be…”

His voice stopped suddenly and his eyes wandered away from John again. There was a tension writ across his face.

As John watched him, mildly disconcerted, he recognized the signs of what he was seeing. Sherlock, always so relentless and unflinching when it came to revealing the truths of others, seemed to falter when it came to his own emotions. As if, out of all things, this was difficult to talk about; as if even now he was still coming to terms with the fact that he could _have_ them.

Somehow he instinctively, intuitively knew what word Sherlock had been going to finish that sentence with: _Hurtful._

John tried to imagine what it’d be like, if somehow he came back looking different but still feeling the same, thinking of himself as the same. What it would be like if he went to Sherlock expecting things to be no different, only for Sherlock to look at him without recognition or feeling at all.

He swallowed. “Okay,” he promised Sherlock, nodding. “I’ll do my best.”

“I know that you will,” Sherlock murmured. “I would expect nothing less of you.”

John sort of figured that would be that, but when he went to turn around Sherlock startled him by continuing to speak once more.

“Did I ever tell you why it is I came back? I could’ve gone anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world – in fact it probably would’ve been better if I had. Much easier. At least as far as maintaining the illusion of my death goes. But instead, I came back to you.”

He didn’t say anything else and John’s brow furrowed. He opened his mouth to ask for an answer and suddenly, he realized he already had one. Sherlock had given it to him, clear as day.

 _“I came back_ to you _.”_

John’s lips were still parted, dawning comprehension he was sure writ across his features as he met Sherlock’s gaze.

The corner of Sherlock’s mouth twitched in a smirk he couldn’t hold. “In the end I’ve grown too attached to you. My process has altered itself in ways that don’t seem to work without your presence.” He drew a very quiet breath but his voice stayed factual. “Without you, I can’t function.”

John needed a second to maintain his composure.

“That is the nicest, weirdest, most borderline accusatory thing you’ve ever said to me,” he told Sherlock with complete sincerity.

Sherlock gave a faint smile. “I mean it.”

John assured him, “I know that you do.”

They didn’t say anything else. John supposed it was because they didn’t need to. He nodded again.

“Well I’m off. I should be by later in the evening.”

“I make no promises, but _one_ of us should be here,” Sherlock told him. He picked up his violin again. “In the meantime, I’m sure we can manage to take care of each other.”

John laughed at that. “Oh yeah, I’m sure.”

*

The hours of the morning crept by into afternoon.

Sherlock played music until he became aware of the thought he might be using it to fill up the silence – once it occurred to him, the idea annoyed him too much and he had to stop. He put the violin away.

He sat. He thought. The clock ticked as the minutes and hours continued progressing

He reached a point in his ruminations on the case he was working (not so much a ‘case’, really, not like he was used to, that gave it more credit than it was worth – more a puzzle to keep his mind at least partially occupied) where he hit a sort of wall, and couldn’t seem to make himself go any further.

Sherlock glanced at the clock. By his calculations, his counterpart should be up by now.

He rose from the chair and walked to the doorframe of his still dark bedroom.

He could just make out the figure lying there. The sheets and blankets had been kicked off completely, thrown in carelessness to the floor. All was silence but there was an alertness in the air and he could tell by the tremor of her breathing that she was awake.

“I need the bed,” he announced.

Her head turned; his eyes had adjusted enough he could see her glance at him. “For what? Sleeping?”

“No.” He didn’t bother to explain himself. Sometimes he could think more conductively if he had a change of space, even a very minor one.

But if anyone would understand that, certainly it was her.

She moved to one side of the mattress and picked up a pillow, tossing it to the open space next to her feet.

“Have at,” she told him.

Sherlock came over and flopped down on the empty side of the bed.

They lay next to each other, facing opposite ends. His hands were folded atop his chest and hers were behind her head and they both stared up at the ceiling, thinking. About different things, he imagined – probably.

Eventually however Sherlock’s thoughts began to drift, floating to one side as if pushed by an errant breeze. He was acutely aware of the other breathing human beside him, the weight of her body against his mattress and the faint warmth emanating from her skin.

Normally he’d no problems ignoring others when he wanted to think, but this one – ah, this one was very different. Far more interesting than whatever was trying to hold his focus.

Without turning his head he considered her from the side of his vision. A slender body with pale skin from avoidance of the sun, enough curvature to be marked as distinctly feminine. Nails that were clipped efficiently short, black hair that was likely washed and brushed and then allowed to air-dry – there was subtle disarray in her thick locks that spoke to a thorough avoidance of product and cosmetics. Her undergarments likewise maximized functionality and comfort: sports bra paired with knickers in a cut most referred to, aptly, as ‘boyshorts’.

Her head moved, and he lifted his chin, meeting with a pale-eyed gaze in the dark that burned with inquisitiveness and uncommon intelligence.

 _Ahh._ Sherlock caught his breath and held it.

There were some things, a select few out of all that existed in the world, which Sherlock did not permit himself to waste time wondering about. Things he knew were impossible for him to ever know; that for one reason or another experiments or analysis on could never be arranged.

One of these was what he looked like to other people – what was it that could be seen, from the outside looking at him.

Except now here was a chance for him to answer that question.

“You’re more distracting than I anticipated,” he stated to her. “Instead of my case, I’ve spent the last several minutes thinking on how your pace for breathing and blinking appears to perfectly mirror mine.”

She gave a thinly amused smile. “That’s funny,” she said. “I’ve spent about the same amount of time noticing that we smell the same, and must have similar patterns of pheromones.”

“Really? How fascinating.”

He pushed himself to a sitting position. She was already propped up on her elbows.

Closing his eyes he breathed in deep, trying to test it out for himself. Far as he could tell she was right; though unfortunately he also caught a faint whiff of yesterday’s cigarettes.

Sherlock paused, feeling the muscles in his face briefly contorting in a pained expression.

He could tell by her voice she was grimacing, knowing what the problem was. “I need to shower,” she muttered. “Wash that off.

“Later.” He waved a hand at her, impatient. Opening his eyes again he considered it, measuring the tingle of yearning on the back of his tongue. “Do you mind…?”

Without him needing to finish she rolled over obligingly, fanning out her hair with one hand so it was easier for him to lean forward and breathe in the lingering trace of tobacco and nicotine. Sherlock gave a quiet groan of satisfaction.

“There are patches,” he told her, after a moment, when he had regained enough control to speak evenly. “Almost an entire box. In case you need them, later.”

“Yes, I’d thought as much,” she replied. “Don’t bother telling me where; I should be able to find them.”

When he’d leaned in at first Sherlock had put his hand on her shoulder to help brace himself. However, somehow without realizing it, his fingers had slipped carelessly forward onto the side of her bosom – halfway to a position some might refer to as ‘groping’.

“You’re poking me,” she informed him, mild.

“Oh. Sorry.” He pulled back, the two of them separating without further incident.

They lay there in the dark, facing one another, close enough it probably counted as a form of intimacy. His eyes swept the length of her body with curiosity and deepest scrutiny. Most women, if they caught Sherlock looking at them like this, would respond with either a slap to the face, or assume he was ogling them and begin acting flirtatiously.

“I’ll bet you’ve thought about it before,” she remarked. His eyes flicked back to meet hers. “Even if in passing. Wondered what it would be like, to have a clitoris.”

“Well, yes,” he answered, unhesitant, with pointed amusement. “But just as similarly, I’m certain you’ve wondered about what it would be like to have a cock.”

She met his smile with a matching one of her own. “True.”

They might have to try and compare notes later, he reasoned. See if their identical thinking patterns and ways of expressing themselves made it possible to describe what was otherwise potentially indescribable information.

Despite certain insinuations and annoyingly endless speculation to the contrary, Sherlock wasn’t a virgin – he had spent a few years experimenting (after the thought-muddling period of puberty was well past, of course) with various situations and types of sexual acts. The interest had lasted exactly as long as there’d still been spaces to fill in his collection of data, and not a second more than that.

He could only assume the same was true for Amalthea. Or at least, that’d be what she’d recall.

Although, that did bring something else to mind – he frowned at her, considering.

“You have all the same memories I do, even from your formative years?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said slowly, drawing out the syllable a bit. She raised her eyebrows at him. “I was under the impression we’d already been through all this.”

“For several years while I was at school, the institutions I attended were exclusively male,” Sherlock stated out loud, musing. He considered it half a second and then asked her, with sharp inquisitiveness, “Fifth year, the indolent Mr. Patterson. Second desk from the far left, third row?”

“Yes. It was at the perfect angle to watch the progress of the nests birds would build in the tree right outside the window.”

“Do you actually remember there being any other girls in your class?”

She faltered, considering, and he watched her eyes widen a fraction in surprise. “…No.” She realized. Her expression changed to stiff annoyance. “Lazy programming, indeed.”

It went deeper than that, he knew. What she was, was in the end a product – and if the process was inferior, it was hard not to think that the result might also be. Pieces from something better put through the ringer and cobbled back together in an inferior mind.

“It’s a wonder I delegate any precious space to remembering secondary school at all,” he reassured her. “It isn’t as if any of that is actually important.” When she didn’t respond after a moment, he added, “Anyway, consider the alternative. Would you rather there’d been made so many alternations that you had to deal with acknowledging the many holes they’d poked in?”

“You have a point,” she said, sounding much better about the whole thing.

After another moment of silence she looked at him sideways. “Tell me about this case you’re working on.”

He made a dismissive sound. “It’s not a case, it’s a distraction. A very measly one at that.” Examining her was far more diverting.

“Well, perhaps I would also like to be distracted,” she declared stubbornly. “Anyway, you don’t know, maybe I can help.”

“By giving me the same opinion twice?”

“It would be a slightly more productive version of thinking out loud.”

“Oh, very well. If you’re going to be so insistent.”

He made himself more comfortable, finding it only slightly odd that he was far less annoyed by the imposition than he would usually be.

*

As promised John returned to the flat in the early evening. There had apparently been no further noisy disturbances from upstairs, as when he passed by 221A he didn’t hear that Mrs. Hudson had her telly on.

When he entered 221B, at first he didn’t see anyone. John looked around, calling out, “Sherlock?”, since that would suffice for either of them.

Eventually his attentions caught the note on the center table.

_John-_

_The other one has already left for the evening. I am in the shower._

_SH_

As soon as he listened for it, he did indeed hear the sound of water running.

He shuddered as he considered the fact that while the pipes were apparently still on, the lack of heat would make for a very cold wash. Then again, knowing Sherlock he might not mind. He might not even _notice_.

And then John remembered that, last he’d seen, the curtain had been taken _off_ the shower, which meant that all the water was likely going to end up on the floor.

With an aggrieved groan he looked around for something that could mop up the mess. His sights landed on a pile of rags and he snatched them up in both his arms, hurrying in the direction of the bathroom.

“Sherlock,” he began loudly as he pushed the door open with one shoulder, frustrated and annoyed.

Because he’d recognized the handwriting he had assumed the Sherlock still in the flat would have to be the male one.

He was entirely unprepared as he got a full view of the woman version standing under the tap, washing her hair. She twisted in his direction, blinking water from her eyes.

“What?” she asked, completely unperturbed to find him standing there. Staring at her. Made acutely aware of the fact that the water must be _very_ cold indeed.

“…Oh _god_ ,” John managed to force out, somewhere between a squeal and a shriek.

She made a scrunched-up, bemused face at him that he recognized. It was one he’d come to think of as _‘Why are you making loud noises at me John, it’s very annoying’._ Of course, before he was used to eliciting it after an argument about how board games worked or why dead things shouldn’t be stored next to the perishables, and _not_ situations involving very present nudity.

“I am so sorry, I didn’t mean, I thought…”

He endeavored to focus on that face, and _only_ that face, as he babbled some, flailed, flung the rags in her general direction, and beat a hasty retreat.

And it wasn’t like he’d been unaware she was a woman, or even an _attractive_ woman, it’s just that until that very moment he hadn’t had it thrust in his face so obtrusively like that. It didn’t help that it’d been a long time since he’d been on a date, never mind _alone_ with a naked girl, even counting ones that he only got to see on his computer screen.

He was trying hard to be good, and do the right thing, which was just think of her as Sherlock in another body – except that body was a very _different_ kind of body, and after seeing as much of it as he had it was very difficult to banish thoughts from his mind that had her in a context that was about as far as it could be from _Sherlock._

Three minutes later he was standing in the common area with one hand pressed to his chest, bent slightly forward as he tried to breathe normally.

There was a creak and a splash from down the hall, and eventually Amalthea wandered in barefoot but wearing trousers, buttoning up a dark purple blouse with still-damp hair.

“What was that about?” she demanded, giving him an odd look. “It isn’t like you’ve never seen me without clothes on before.”

“Actually, no, as a matter of fact I _haven’t_ ,” he pointed out to her, unable to help that his voice was coming out rather shrill.

She paused, thought about it, and then shrugged, dismissive. “Oh. But still.”

“But still _what?_ ” John cried. “For god’s sake, Sherlock!”

“Well if it was going to be such an objection, then why did you come in when you knew I’d be washing up?”

“Because I…” He trailed off, gesturing futilely in the direction of the note on the table. “Because it didn’t occur to me that the two of you would have the same bloody handwriting, that’s why! Oh, _christ_.”

He pressed a hand over his face, just praying he hadn’t gone beet-red, shaking his head back and forth. _Muscle memory,_ he reminded himself yet one more time. At this point it was beginning to sound like some kind of bizarre mantra.

Eyes still covered, he muttered, “Did you use the towels and things I dropped to mop up the puddles from the floor?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” At least, if nothing else, they’d be safe from the wrath of poor Mrs. Hudson.

John dropped his hand and slowly turned in Amalthea’s direction. She was still giving him that annoyed and puzzled look. It was easily the most maddening part of all.

“Do me a favor,” he said, tersely. “From now on, could you please sign anything with your different initials, okay? So I don’t get confused which one of you all my non-verbal communications are from!”

“I still don’t understand why you’re upset,” she stated flatly.

He gave her a dubious look. “You don’t understand why walking in on the presence of a _completely unexpected_ naked woman might…use that over-sized incidental catalogue of a head of yours!” John gestured flippantly. “Don’t you remember what happened, that time with the Adler woman?”

She made a face, rolling her eyes. “That was _her_.” She bent over to grab a towel that’d been tracked in, rubbing it furiously around her hair. “You and I have a completely different relationship.”

John scoffed. “We have a different relationship because you’re supposed to be a _man_ ,” he emphasized. “I realize I shouldn’t be rubbing that in or anything, but I think it’s kind of important to remember.”

Amalthea stood again, tossing the towel at the floor. It landed by John’s feet; with a sigh, he went to pick it up.

“Why?” she demanded. “It doesn’t make any sense. Certain things are affected by biology; the kind of interactions two people are capable of having together isn’t one of them.”

John managed to keep his face entirely blank as he deadpanned, “I’d argue that’s not really true.”

She ignored that. “Why should our history together be any different as a result of what gender I happen to have?”

“You’re asking me that? Really?” John questioned. “You, the master of analyzing the way people behave and react to one another, and you’re telling me you can’t begin to see why someone might have a slightly different impression if you changed something like whether you’re a man or a woman?”

She said derisively, “I’m not talking about _people_ , John. I’m talking about _you._ ”

John let out a long and prominent sigh, his gaze going towards the ceiling.

When he looked back she was still eyeing him, now with a frown and her arms crossed. She seemed to have moved down the scale away from indignation and onto almost childishly confused.

John realized he was really going to have to try and explain this to her. He stalled a moment, mouth half-open, making a sound that wasn’t a word because he didn’t know where to begin.

“It’s just…there are _differences_ , okay? Things that would have had to have changed, if I had met you like this. Things that just couldn’t have happened the same.”

“Like what?” Her voice was quiet, inquisitive. Still somehow not coming up with answers on her own.

John decided to go back to the beginning: “Well for starters, I’d have given the two of us moving in together a lot more thought. I mean, with appearances, and everything.” She tilted her head at him, blankly, and John raised his eyebrows for emphasis. “A man and a woman, living together – people don’t _usually_ think that means platonically.”

“Yes well, from what I’ve read on the internet,” she remarked, dry, “you and he both being men doesn’t seem to have done anything to keep them from drawing their conclusions.”

“Well, _no_ , but…” John cut himself off. “Bad example. Let me think of another one.” Since he’d just mentioned the scandal case with Irene Adler he tried looking for the right kind of detail on that one. Obviously the weird attraction between them wouldn’t be any different – it might even be stronger, since Adler had confirmed or at least implied she was a lesbian. Though, speaking of things that had happened there…

John blinked, and he turned to look at Amalthea with more curiosity. “What did you disguise yourself as, to get inside her house?”

“A _nun_ ,” she told him, in a tone like it should be perfectly obvious. John was silent as he pictured that. She gave a careless shrug. “And a victim of a mugging, more specifically. With a little help from your capable fists.”

“Ah, see, right there,” John said quickly, grabbing ahold on what she’d offered. “What you just said. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. You’re saying you got me to punch you in the face?”

“Yes,” she replied, impatient. “Don’t tell me I have to describe what happened to you. You were _there_.”

“Yes, yes I was, but don’t you see?” He waved a hand at her, frustrated and incredulous she wasn’t getting it. “I wouldn’t have punched you if you were a woman!”

Her brow furrowed. “But I asked you to.”

“That _doesn’t matter!_ ” John exclaimed. “I wouldn’t up and hit a woman in the face! Even if she was being insufferable, and had hit me first. I mean, it would take a lot more provocation!”

Amalthea didn’t look entirely convinced. Actually, it didn’t look as if she was following anything he was saying. John wondered if he should just give up.

“Look, just take my word for it, alright?” he said, which he knew was the mark of a desperate man. But he couldn’t think of anything else.

The only thing that kept coming to mind was _“If you’d always been a woman, at least I wouldn’t have been so exasperated with everyone always thinking we were a couple”,_ which…no, nope. He wasn’t letting himself go there. He certainly wasn’t about to _say_ it.

Even if she was quite pretty, if in an ‘I don’t know what a hairdryer is’ sort of way. She _was_ still Sherlock.

John wasn’t going to let himself forget that.

He shook his head, and looked up to find that she had wandered off, put on her shoes, and was in the process of shrugging into her coat.

“Where are you going?” John asked her, surprised.

“I told my other self I’d met up with him later, to help out on something he’s working with.”

He gave her a doubtful, concerned look, and frowned.

“Are you sure that’s entirely…safe?”

She shrugged. “Maybe not.” She smirked, eyes flashing in that wicked sort of way. “But at least I’ll be in good company.”

Well – she had a point there. If one Sherlock Holmes could get away from those Rossum people, they’d certainly be in for it if they showed up and unexpectedly ran into two. John might even pay to see that.

As if she was reading his mind, Amalthea lingered back a step. With one gloved hand she held onto the edge of the door.

“Coming?”

John hesitated. He wasn’t really supposed to; he and Sherlock, when he’d first come back, had both agreed that one of them skulking around London trying to solve crime was bad enough. It’d be too conspicuous, practically asking for trouble if they went together.

Even if John sort of missed it, occasionally getting shot at and all.

Even if he was pretty certain Sherlock missed having him.

Looking at Amalthea’s expression as she watched him, waiting for his answer, that went from ‘ _pretty_ certain’ to ‘absolutely’. John felt a smile come over his face.

Why not? Just once couldn’t hurt. And how could he pass up on the opportunity to watch not one but two Sherlocks in action?

“Right behind you.”


	7. Too Many Pieces

Alone at the intersection of two side streets in a somewhat dodgy commercial area, Sherlock waited.

His intended destination for the evening was two blocks over, but of course he wasn’t stupid enough to stand listlessly out in front of it as he passed the time, drawing attention to himself and looking frightfully conspicuous to anyone who might happen by. It being the middle of the night and all the shops closed was no insurance against circumstance.

He stayed where he was, back straight and hands in his pockets. His only outward motion, save for the occasional turn of his head and shift of his eyes, was an errant breeze working against the locks of his hair.

The night was warm enough for the time of year, but windy, and the lack of many streetlights in the vicinity contributed to making things seem – at least superficially – darker and perhaps colder than they really were.

It was not much of a distraction. Normally it would be tuned out immediately. But for an already restless mind, it served.

 _Focusing,_ for Sherlock, had never at any point in his life been a problem - excepting perhaps when he had to bear the complaints of others that he was focusing on the “wrong” things. As far as his own priorities went though, no; never a problem.

He was coming the closest he’d ever had to having a problem with it now.

Too many directions. He could care less about the case he was working. A mediocre situation: a puzzle with too few pieces, involving embezzling and possibly blackmail, and one case of accidental manslaughter which had, naturally, led to a cover-up.

All very routine, predictable, quite frankly beneath him. But at the time it’d been the only suitable entertainment London had to offer.

That was no longer the situation however. Now, there was his doppelganger, there was the strange and secretive corporation that pursued her, the toe-end of some massive global conspiracy backed by dangerous financial, possibly governmental forces.

 _That_ was something Sherlock wanted to be working on. Much more exciting and worthy of his focus.

And there was Amalthea herself. How often did one get the chance to examine his own reflection, fully present and multi-dimensional in another being? Never.

He wanted to _dissect_ her. Piece her apart and pour over each and every layer, examine her thoroughly in a manner of strictest fascination which he rarely had for other humans.

But as it was, it was also not in his nature to leave a mystery – however minor and unsatisfactory – unsolved. There were still one, maybe two steps he needed to take before he could reach the end. Finish the case.

Only then his attentions could be fully focused on what he _really_ wanted.

Sherlock shut his eyes a moment. Immersed himself in the darkness and listened for any minor sounds. After thirty seconds revealed nothing particularly crucial he opened them again.

The sign from the shop at the very right corner of his vision was missing three letters. There was a crumpled newspaper of yesterday’s edition stuck beneath the bench directly across the street.

He resisted the uncommon, annoying urge he was having to check the time.

No one was running late. It was a cheap trick of impatience his perceptions were playing on him.

He no longer had anything to check the time on, anyway, since he didn’t carry a mobile.

He went completely still as two familiar figures suddenly appeared in his field of version, with perfect timing, his eyes opening ever so slightly wider.

He didn’t, couldn’t move, because he was holding back an unbidden, reflexive sigh of relief.

Amalthea strode toward him, arms and legs swinging freely. John was a step behind at her left, hands buried deep in the pockets of his coat, clearly more bothered or simply more aware of the cold than she was.

Sherlock gave a single nod in greeting. “About time,” he stated. Amalthea returned his nod with a matching one of her own and said nothing. “You found the way all right?” He hadn’t left much in the way of actual directions.

She didn’t even blink. “Of course,” she replied, frank, simple.

Their eyes met for a beat, a look exchanged sufficient to express his satisfaction. Then he looked past her, at John.

“You decided to join us.”

It had been always a possibility, of course. But he hadn’t been entirely sure, not quite able to form a complete prediction John would follow. Sherlock was glad that he had.

John’s mouth twitched. “Oh,” he said with an eloquent note of sarcasm, “me, not tag along on this misadventure? And miss out on the chance to be belittled and insulted by _two_ of you?” He scoffed, “How could I _possibly_ pass that up.”

Sherlock laughed silently, the sound buried deep in his throat. A grin of camaraderie formed itself on his face. He could see the matching response coming to John’s face as well, the usual pattern with their grim jokes.

Then at the moment when he should’ve met Sherlock’s eyes, sharing their joint mirth, he turned in the opposite direction.

Instead of looking at Sherlock, John looked to Amalthea, and they smiled together in the same way.

Before he could stop himself Sherlock’s face twisted into a frown, brow furrowing in disappointment and a momentary sense of disorientation.

 _She was closer,_ he told himself, somewhat forcibly. It didn’t matter. Couldn’t.

He ducked his head in a jerking movement, clearing the back of his throat. Just in the nick of time too. John looked back towards him but didn’t appear to notice anything.

“So,” he began, “what exactly then, are we all doing here?”

Amalthea offered up the explanation first. “Oh, all the usual. A little bit of breaking and entering.” She looked towards Sherlock herself. “I couldn’t find any tools at the flat. I assume _you_ must have them,” she stated.

“Of course,” he responded without any pause. John’s eyes went back and forth between them.

“Hang on. We’re here to-” But he stopped himself with a short laugh and a shake of his head, somewhat depreciative, before he could fully form the question. “Right. Yeah.” With a sigh he tilted his head upward. “Of course we’re here to break into some place. Why else would it possibly be?”

Sherlock exchanged a glance with Amalthea, and in consensus they started walking. There was but the pace of a few seconds before John began to follow.

“I do hope that at some point one of you will be so good as to fill me in on just _where_ it is we’re breaking into, and _why?_ ” John questioned.

Without looking back Sherlock assured him, offhandedly, “Of course.”

The three of them made their way down the street in their procession of three, Amalthea keeping perfectly matched strides with him while John seemed content to linger a step behind them both. Their duo may have become three, Sherlock told himself, but surely that didn’t make a thing different. Not anything of _real_ importance.

“You know the location better than I do,” Amalthea said. “What do you estimate is our window of opportunity?”

“We should endeavor to be in and out, less than fifteen minutes,” Sherlock responded. He came to a halt at the foot of the building he was interested in. His neck tilted back absently as he had another look around. “That would be the optimum.”

“I would’ve figured it to be something like that,” Amalthea confirmed. She looked around as well, head turning side to side as she strained to see around the edges of the street corner.

John, meanwhile, was reading the sign of the second-floor walk-up he’d determined held their interest. “An imported carpets store,” he observed. “Okay.” He seemed to take it all in in passing. “Now what?”

“Now one of us is going to go inside – that would be me – and have a look around,” Sherlock told him. He was already busy gathering the lock-picks and other assorted burglary tools he’d brought out of his coat. “You are going to watch my back while I ascertain our entry, and then, once the coast is clear, you’re going to follow. Here, hold this.”

He all but shoved a small satchel into John’s arms. The other man fumbled with it at first, off-guard, but successfully managed to keep his hold.

Sherlock continued, “There’s some minor concern to be had as to the positioning of this building where it relates to-”

“That alley,” Amalthea finished for him, pointing. “Yes, I’d already noticed as much.” She turned to face him. “Want that I should keep watch over there, then?”

Sherlock favored her with a very small smirk, and quipped, “You read my mind.”

She returned the smirk with a similar one and an unsaid note of acerbic humor, before heading off quickly in the direction with a nod. Sherlock wasn’t watching very hard and she swiftly vanished into the night.

He had as much concern for her as he would’ve had for himself pulling off something similar – which was to say, not at all.

John kept his eyes on the direction she had gone for a while longer, neck straining and face swiveling as he endeavored to keep lookout over both of them at once. Finally he shifted in closer behind where Sherlock was hard at work on the hinges of the door.

“Seems like the two of you are working it out all right so far. Division of labor and everything,” he remarked.

Sherlock said nothing. John didn’t wait very long in silence before he continued.

“It’s good, I suppose. I mean – of course it would be. Though there’s something a bit ironic about the both of you working just fine together when you can’t hardly ever stand working with anyone else.”

“Hn,” was Sherlock’s only verbal response. He didn’t look up or move from where he was crouched down, intent on his task with the hinges. John accepted that as answer but only held his tongue for another moment.

“Look, I’m not trying to get ahead of you or anything. But I can’t help wondering…have you given any thought as to the long-term? I mean; what’s going to happen here in London, now that there’s two of you around?”

“There’s no room for any of that just yet, John,” Sherlock informed him factually without looking up. “What happens with _her_ depends entirely on what develops with this conspiracy. How that matter is eventually resolved. Until then, I don’t believe either us can care to speculate.”

That said he finished with his work, standing back up with a quietly triumphant air as the door swung inward, creaking faintly.

He turned towards John, and smiled. “Shall we?”

John smiled back, and then the atmosphere was completely ruined by the sound of two gunshots echoing in the night.

He watched the color drain from John’s face, his head snap around. Already Sherlock was turning, mentally working out where the shots had come from. But the answer was obvious: from Amalthea’s direction.

“I didn’t check to see whether or not she still had that gun,” John blurted. “I didn’t think to ask.”

She had it – Sherlock knew she had it. It’s what he would’ve done in her place. He didn’t waste time or his breath reassuring John of this fact. He pointed.

“Head back over there, to that street corner,” he ordered. “Stay out of sight. I’ll go and see what happened.”

“Sherlock,” John started to protest, alarmed. He’d gone white as a sheet. Sherlock reached to grab his arm at the elbow, meeting his eyes.

“There’s no time,” he hissed, intent. “The authorities or some nosy do-gooder could be here any minute, now that there’s been shots fired. Clearly this night’s a wash,” he muttered to himself. To John he went on, “I can take care of this _. Trust_ me. Yes?”

John swallowed, nodded. “Okay.”

“Good.” Sherlock nodded back at him and then ran off in the right bearing, pulse rising steadily and senses on high alert.

He reached the alley and slowed down his pace, feeling a minor sense of relief as he took in the scene.

Amalthea stood in the middle, arm outstretched and half-raised, the gun in her hand. There was a man lying prone by her feet.

Dead, Sherlock determined at a glance, as he raced to get beside her. Early thirties with build, haircut and suit that fairly screamed professional security. Of Spanish descent, going by the skin tone, but born and raised in England for at least three generations judging by the way he wore his shirt cuffs and collar.

“Rossum employee?” Sherlock guessed easily, once he stood at her elbow.

She nodded, eyes wide and half-focused, her manner notably unsettled. He could tell her mind was racing.

“He claimed to be my handler, originally,” she said in a toneless voice.

“We need to get out of here,” he told her. But then in his next breath he asked, “What’s wrong?”

She gave a brief shake of her head. Turning to look at him over her shoulder she asked, “What about the store?”

“No. No time. We have to get out of here, before the police show.” He looked at the dead man, then around at their surroundings. “Should we hide the body?”

“No. Rossum will do that themselves,” she informed him. “It’s the kind of loose end they’d want tied. Let’s go. I – we have to hurry.”

They both started running back towards the direction he’d left John at the exact same time. But still Sherlock held on to enough of his breath to ask her, pressingly, “Why?”

She breathed in. The look on her face was intent, distracted, somewhere between angry and worried in the tension.

“That’s the second time he’s found me. Rodrigo was not what I’d call a good tracker.”

Right away Sherlock understood.

*

From the moment he’d heard the gun go off, as soon as he’d realized the sound had come from where he’d last seen Amalthea, something deep inside of John was resonating with the urge to scream.

The image of a tombstone had flickered through his mind. Every instinct of his had lit up in a panic.

_‘Sherlock!’_

It just about knocked the wind out of him in relief when they both appeared again safe and sound, leaving him weak in the knees and gasping.

He didn’t think either of them noticed. They kept on running and like always, it was up to John to follow.

He wanted answers. He got them – they were short and shouted in broken apart sentence fragments, tracing just about the entire length of their way back to Baker Street. More or less though he figured at the end of it he had the whole story. Save for what he considered one crucial detail. John didn’t understand why they couldn’t slow down.

They ran until he was about out of breath, and then they ran some more. There was no stopping for anything short of heavy traffic of bystanders or a blocked road. They took all the back ways, so there was hardly anybody to see them.

John knew without looking, without asking, that they were doing their best to avoid all the cameras.

Worn out as he was and focused intently on running, he took in without analysis or full absorption the fact that as they went every once in a while the male Sherlock stole a glance at him, making sure he was still with them and doing okay, but the female one never did. That the whole time she kept her gaze ahead.

It wasn’t until they got back to the flat that the reality presented it to him. Though even had he noticed the details, the idea probably never would’ve occurred to John.

Amalthea Sherlock Holmes was still a Sherlock Holmes. Under even extraordinary circumstances, John didn’t think Sherlock had it in him to panic.

They were back upstairs, no witnesses, the door shut soundly behind them. John bent forward double with his hands at his knees, chest heaving as he relished this chance to finally catch his breath.

He was still recovering as he looked up again, lifting his head, ready to ask more questions. His mouth opened but he scarcely had a chance to make a sound as he watched Amalthea wrench her coat off her body with lightning speed, as if the fabric was burning her.

One of the sleeves almost caught at her elbow but Sherlock had already moved in to help her, standing just behind and shrugging the coat off of her.

John watched, mouth parted, with a look of bemusement.

And then Amalthea started taking off her shirt.

“We have to find it,” she snapped. Her fingers flew over her buttons in a blur, plucking them apart. “Figure out where it is and remove it. _Fast_.”

By the time she was standing there in knickers and a camisole, imploring Sherlock as he reached to press hands against her exposed skin, John somehow found his voice again.

“What – hang on here,” he exclaimed, at a loss. “Just what the devil are the two of you _doing_?”

They both paused, heads turning in a swift simultaneous movement, and John tried not to think with exasperation that it was like they’d forgotten he was even there.

“Looking for the tracking device,” Amalthea explained.

John gaped, shut his mouth and then his eyes, and ultimately had nothing but to repeat her. “Tracking device?”

“ _Tracking device_. Yes, John, _yes_ ,” she shouted at him, exasperated, and went back to looking furtively at her own skin. “We have to find it and figure out a way to deactivate it, otherwise it’s only a matter of time before Rossum’s breaking our door in.”

She practically had her forehead pressed to her arm, fingernails smoothing down and pinching at her skin, dark hair blocking her face in ungainly waves.

“Where is it? Where? There must be something, some kind of a mark…”

John tried very hard to figure out what she was talking about. He sighed. “No…sorry. Not following. Afraid you’re going to have to back up and explain.”

She made a short, irritated sound. But at least she deigned to look at him while she fired off her answer.

“Twice now since I left their custody has Rodrigo Mendez been able to find me. Walked right up to me, clearly somehow aware of exactly where I’d be.”

“Rodrigo Mendez?” John’s mouth went a little dry, and he swallowed. “This would be the man that you shot, then? Back at the alley?”

“Obviously,” Sherlock put in. “He was private security. Such a high level of being able to follow someone’s trail would be beyond him.”

“There has to be another explanation,” Amalthea finished, curt, words running swiftly. “This body is, after all, _rental_ property. It would make sense that they’d want ways of keeping track of it when it’s out on assignment. Therefore: tracking device. Can’t be in my clothes – too unreliable, and I’d have found it by now, long before.” Turning her head and bending at the side, now she was checking her legs, glancing down. “Has to be embedded subcutaneously.”

Her hands, John realized, as he watched them fly across her body, were shaking ever so slightly. There was a different force than expediency driving the wide, angry look to her eyes. The spitting impatience to her words.

Another reminder came from within his memories.

_‘Look at me, John; I’m frightened.’_

He managed, “So, what – you think there’s some sort of chip or something implanted in you? To tell them exactly where you are. Like a…a stolen car, or a show-dog?”

The disbelief in his voice was far less because of the idea’s validity and more because the implication made him slightly ill.

Neither Amalthea nor Sherlock answered him, which was probably for the best at that point, actually. Sherlock had gone back to aiding his counterpart by checking along her back in areas she couldn’t see.

“They would have to conceal it,” he was saying out loud, musing. “If the outward appearance of validity of their merchandise is such a high concern, it wouldn’t do to leave too obvious a mark, or a scar. Wait.” Abruptly he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her, lifting up her hair.

She leaned forward, grasping most of her locks in one fist. He traced up the top of her spine and stopped with two fingers pressed against the back of her neck.

“There. A small nodule. Right under the skin,” he concluded keenly.

“Get it out,” she ordered.

Nodding, Sherlock cast a glance about and picked up a knife from the nearby table.

John quickly leapt in. “Stop! Okay – let’s not rush into this too carelessly, here.” Reaching over he managed to pry the implement from Sherlock’s grasp. “This would the point where it’s best to let someone with the actual medical training take over. Don’t you think?”

Sherlock frowned at him, miffed. “I wasn’t about to perform brain surgery.”

John gave him a withering look.

Amalthea cut in. “ _Please_ , John,” she implored. “I need it gone. Now.”

His attitude instantly sobered. “Right.” He glanced down at the knife, weighed it in his grasp, and then shook his head. “ _Not_ like this. One moment, promise; I’ve got a scalpel and tweezers in my kit.”

By kit, in this case, he meant the spare bag of medical supplies he had stashed in what had been his bedroom long ago, because one never knew what might come in handy when you lived with Sherlock Holmes.

To the credit of both Sherlocks they gave him the thirty seconds it took to retrieve it without giving up on waiting and hacking away at Amalthea’s skin with a carving knife. Though he could tell by their matching expressions they both thought it was needlessly silly of him to bother with such details as using an antiseptic wipe and putting on gloves.

Fine, John thought. Let him be the only one who thought about such possibilities as infections, then.

He found the spot Sherlock had indicated easily enough – sure enough, there was a slight raised bump there. Carefully he cut into Amalthea’s skin, not having to slice very far before he found what was clearly a foreign object.

Tongue heavy and pulse at the back of his throat, John pulled forth a thin white strip from between the layers of his friend’s flesh. Holding it up to the light he saw delicate lines of circuitry.

Amalthea turned around, eyes on the thing, expression unreadable as she watched John pass it off to Sherlock.

“Now what do we do with it?” John asked. “Cut it up into pieces and throw it out with the rubbish?”

“No.” Sherlock shook his head, thoughtful. “It’s better for us if it stays active, just a while longer.”

Amalthea nodded. “Flush it down a drain somewhere and they might unknowingly follow it around for a bit before they figure it out.”

She ducked her head and made to turn away. John quickly caught her arm, and got her to hold still while he taped a gauze bandage over the cut he’d made on the back of her neck. To his mild relief once he let her go she immediately went to retrieve her trousers and blouse and get dressed again.

Sherlock meanwhile had pocketed the tracking chip, wrapping it up in a handkerchief. “I won’t put it down the pipes here. Too risky. Go out in a bit and find someplace more suitable.”

“Right.” John folded his arms, looking between the two of them. “What’s next? Will you go back and try the break-in again?”

“Far too risky,” Sherlock informed him, diverging.  “No, I’ll have to move onto my secondary plan of how to gather information.”

“I’m sorry,” Amalthea broke in. John turned to her. He couldn’t hide the surprise on his face and from the corner of his eye, he saw, neither could Sherlock. She persevered nonetheless. Her arms were crossed tightly and she had the screwed up, sour expression like from when she had to crossly admit she was wrong. “My presence ruined everything. If I hadn’t been involved-”

“Not your fault,” Sherlock told her, smoothly. “I mean, yes; you’re right of course. None of that would’ve happened if you hadn’t been there and I would’ve been able to proceed as planned. But it’s the blame of those that are pursuing you, not yours.”

“Well gee, don’t fawn all over her,” John said disparagingly, rolling his eyes at him. “Can’t be having anyone think you’re going easier on…yourself.”

Instead of either of them saying a thing to him, though, they just smirked faintly at one another.

John didn’t have much time to bask in his superfluity however before there came a sudden sharp knock at the door.

The three of them exchanged wary looks of surprise. Amalthea took a step back, as if contemplating flight, and Sherlock met John’s eyes. John nodded back in understanding. He went to the door.

Opening it a crack, he was relieved and not entirely amazed to find Mrs. Hudson on the other side.

“Ah, Mrs. Hudson. I was just, um-”

“Oh, hush, hush,” she exclaimed, shocking him enough that she was able to push past him and enter. “We both know what you’re really up to! And I just can’t take it anymore.” She shook her head ruefully, almost tearful. “I’m sorry, dear boys, really, but a woman at my age…”

John turned from the door to cast a wide-eyed, panicky look at the rest of the “abandoned” flat. Amalthea had ducked out of sight somewhere, but Sherlock was still standing in the middle of the room, looking just about as much at a loss as John was.

Mrs. Hudson faced the other man, and sighed. “Look, it’s simply that I _can’t_ go on pretending anymore, Sherlock,” she declared. “I can keep mum with the best of them, but if the two of you are going to keep ducking in and out of here like this at all hours, my poor heart can’t bear it.”

Both men stared at her silently, uncertain as to what she was getting at.

She drew herself up, taking a proud breath. “If you want to keep on ‘not’ staying here, and pretending to be dead, that’s _your_ business,” she told Sherlock. “But the _least_ you can do, I think, is say hello once in a while.”

Sherlock gazed at her with an impassive expression for a beat. Finally he said, smooth, “Of course, Mrs. Hudson. You’re exactly right. Terribly sorry for the inconvenience.”

She made a dismissive sound, her face breaking apart in a smile. “Oh…come here, you,” she clucked. She walked over to Sherlock and hugged him. It was to John’s minor bemusement that Sherlock raised his arms to embrace her back.

Mrs. Hudson was wiping at her eyes with her fingertips, quickly and bothered, when she pulled away again.

“Don’t you dare ever let on to anyone just how much I’ve missed you,” she said threateningly. “Heaven forbid anyone think I’m a pushover.”

“Oh, absolutely not,” Sherlock assured her with an expression of amused smugness. “Your secret’s safe with me. John?” He looked to the other, feigning severity.

John raised his hands up when Mrs. Hudson looked at him. “Not even on pain of death,” he swore. He and Sherlock exchanged a glance over her head, a silent chuckle.

“That goes double for me, as well,” another voice chimed in quietly.

They all turned to where Amalthea stood halfway visible in the doorframe to the next part of the flat, leaning her side against it.

“Oh, and who’s this then?” Mrs. Hudson asked, sounding more surprised than concerned. No doubt the ‘stranger’ being with John and Sherlock vouched for her in some way that went without saying.

John looked to Sherlock in dismay, thoughts racing for a passable explanation.

He stuttered as he began, “She’s, ah, his-”

“Cousin,” Amalthea stepped in smoothly, giving of an air of complete confidence.

“Yes,” Sherlock agreed, backing up that story instantly. “My cousin.”

“Oh, I see.” Mrs. Hudson sounded delighted. She went closer to Amalthea, and behind her back John tried not to breathe too obvious a sigh of relief. “Yes, I see the family resemblance quite plainly.”

Amalthea gave a diffidently polite smile and shook her hand. “Amalthea Holmes. You must be Mrs. Hudson – I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Yes, I imagine she feels as if she knows you already, even,” Sherlock offered with a remarkable lack of irony.

“Such a lovely face you have,” Mrs. Hudson remarked, warmly. “But oh, look at you – you’re practically skin and bones. When’s the last you’ve eaten anything, dear?”

“Thursday,” Amalthea replied automatically, unthinking, visibly confused by the inquiry.

Mrs. Hudson made a disapproving sound. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said quietly. “Come along with me – I’ll get you something to eat. We’ll leave the boys to their fun.”

“But I-” Amalthea started, looking more perplexed by the instant. Enough that she wasn’t able to stop the much older woman from herding her out towards the door.

“Now, now. I _insist_.”

The next thing John knew the door had closed again and there were only two of them.

Sherlock frowned, thrown off by what’d just happened. “That was strange.”

“It’s because she’s female,” John guessed, going to belatedly hang up his jacket. “There’s more of that protective instinct, or something. Plus I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Amalthea does look visibly a bit like she’s younger than you.”

“I’d put her physically around the age of twenty-four,” Sherlock remarked, indicating he had indeed noticed. “No doubt there are practical reasons behind this Dollhouse preferring to use younger bodies.”

“Yeah,” John agreed aloud. He didn’t want to think too much about that, _either_. A subject change was in order. “You think she’s going to be okay?”

Sherlock squinted at him. “Mrs. Hudson?”

“What? No…I mean, I’m sure Mrs. Hudson is going to be fine. At least it’s not like she’ll be worrying any more than she was already, I’m guessing. I was talking about Amalthea.”

Looking just as blank, Sherlock shook his head slowly. “Okay with what?”

“What happened tonight,” John stated, blunt. “You know. Having to kill a man. Finding out about that thing she had stuck up under her skin. All that.”

“She’ll be fine, I’m certain.” Sherlock hesitated. “At least she will eventually.”

“Right,” John mused, “I mean, I guess if anyone would know, it’d probably be you. Right?”

When he didn’t get a response at first he turned around to find Sherlock peering at him narrowly.

“Is something the matter, John?”

“No, no; nothing’s the matter.” He corrected himself: “There are a lot of _things_ going on right now, that are bad, and difficult to deal with, but nothing’s really the _matter_.”

“Are you sure?” Sherlock pressed, still eyeing him like he was something inside a petri dish. John sighed, hands on his hips, and bit at his lower lip.

“It’s just…now that there’s two of you, I can’t help wondering why you even bother bringing me along,” he admitted. “Surely having another version of your genius to bounce ideas off of is much more productive than using me.”

Sherlock shook his head instantly. “If it was about your intellect, then I would’ve never had use of you to begin with.” John repressed a tired sigh – Sherlock went on, unaware. “I admit I do get a certain enjoyment out of having Amalthea around, for several reasons. But she is not _you_. And for that simple reason you remain…irreplaceable.”

“Irreplaceable,” John repeated.

“Yes,” Sherlock drawled.

John was a quiet for a moment, taking that in. “Well.” He grinned. “Now that really is something.”

“Try not to let it go to your head,” Sherlock told him.

“Oh no,” John said quickly, reassuring. “One of us has to remain humble. And god knows it isn’t going to be you.”

Sherlock pretended to ignore him in favor of looking through some rubbish on the nearby table. But from his vantage point John could see enough of his face to tell that he was grinning.

*

Adelle sat in the chair behind the desk in her office. She sat up straight, hands lightly gripping both armrests. It would only take someone who knew her very, very well to see that she was doing for her the equivalent of slouching – pressed back against the seat by the heavy weight of intense frustration.

To say things had not been going well as of late would be a supreme and inapt understatement.

The door to her office opened and Mr. MacPherson hesitated at the point of entering, the ruddy color to his face indicative that he had just finished yelling at someone.

Adelle turned in her chair to look at him, sharply, and taking it for the silent command that it was he quickly walked toward her.

“Well?” she demanded. “I take it you don’t have good news.”

Her security man shook his head, having the grace to look terribly uncomfortable.

“Only of you count the fact that so far Havisham’s keeping up her end of the workload.”

Adelle rotated her chair away so she no longer faced him directly but at a sideways angle, dismissive. It didn’t at all surprise her to hear that their now only programmer was successfully meeting expectations. Victoria had always displayed a certain dedication to their work there – something that it had clearly been _far_ more crucial than Adelle first realized that her other choice for programmer had been lacking.

It went without saying that once the extent of his failings had been aired, Dr. Bickerton was sent to the Attic. Adelle was not a forgiving employer, and neither was the Dollhouse.

“Anything else,” she demanded of MacPherson, clipped.

The last time there’d been anything like direct contact made with their still-missing Active, the man who had made it was dead. She knew better than to presume another round would immediately bear much of an improvement.

“It’s the tracking device,” the gruff man finally bit out. “My team followed it for six blocks and finally wound up fishing it out of a sewer.”

Adelle was glad she wasn’t looking at him, so that he probably missed it when her eyes went heavenward in exasperation.

“She must’ve found out about it somehow and got it removed,” he finished.

“Clearly,” Adelle stated in response, dry. When he didn’t say anything else she tilted her head back towards him, her look severe. “Is there anything else?”

“I’ve still got people out looking for her,” he offered, insistent. “They stand some chance of picking up her scent. There’s been no sign she’s made contact with anyone that we’d have to cover for, so we’re not backed into a corner yet.”

“What is it that you suggest, Mr. MacPherson? I allow this obviously talented and extremely clever Active to continue running amuck until things get even worse than they already have?”

“No, no ma’am. I was just saying-”

“Enough. I know what you were trying to say.” She crossed her legs. “You were trying to save face. Not that I blame you – right now, it’s something that everyone in this House has to worry about. Me most of all, once the Center hears the extent of this.”

Adelle shook her head.

“No. I’m not going to make the mistake of dragging this out any longer. It’s time to throw in the towel.”

MacPherson dropped his head. “If that’s what you think is best, Ms. DeWitt.”

“It is,” she said conclusively. “Recall our forces back to the House, where they may actually be of use. You may go.”

As the head of security left the room with a rigid haggard set to his shoulders, Adelle sighed, and continued more to herself than to him:

“It’ll have to be up to our well-connected ‘friend’ to find her for us, now.”

*

When John returned to 221B the next evening he found the flat empty of occupants. Nonplussed, and without any way of immediately contacting either Sherlock, he decided to wait around.

He was rewarded an hour and a half later by the sound of feet coming up the stairs. John crossed over to the door and threw it open.

He was just in time to allow entry to the pair of them, the male one walking in front and the female bringing up the rear, a large rolled-up carpet carried between them across their shoulders.

“Thank you, John,” Sherlock told him in passing as they walked right by him further into the flat.

“Most helpful,” Amalthea chimed in, finishing.

“What’s this?” John shut the door and then turned around with a frown, eyeing the carpet confusedly. “I didn’t know we were in the market for redecorating.”

“Oh, just something we thought might bring a little character to the place,” Sherlock said with a touch of strange humor that had John instantly on his guard.

It was then he realized that if he looked at the one end of the rolled-up rug he could make out what looked to be a pair of feet.

John pointed. “Um. Is there a body in there?”

“No.” Amalthea glanced at him over her shoulder as they set the carpet down on the floor, with a care that rather confirmed than denied John’s suspicions.

His disbelief was palpable in his face, clearly, because once she finished and let go she straightened up and came closer to address him.

“‘Body’ implies dead,” she explained. “This one’s still very much alive. Just unconscious.”

John sputtered. “You’ve brought a kidnapped man here?” he exclaimed. Amalthea exchanged a look with Sherlock, both of them seemingly puzzled.

“Well where else would you rather we brought him?” she demanded.

“We couldn’t have taken him to your place,” Sherlock explained, matter of fact. “It’d have been too hard getting him in through the window.”

John couldn’t say anything to that – he just groaned. Turning away from them he pressed one hand to his forehead.

There was a muffled sound from inside the rolled-up carpet. Sherlock glanced at Amalthea.

“He’s coming around,” he said, and she nodded. Looking back at John again Sherlock considered him a moment and then continued, attempting to be reassuring, “This is the final piece. All I need is to get this man to confess to his part in the crime, and then I’m done with this case. It’s over.”

“Yes, of course it is,” John declared. He pressed both his hands over his face, now. “Until the next one, and the next, and the one after that. And meanwhile, there’s this whole killer international high-level conspiracy we’re currently embroiled in. Let’s not forget that!”

There was such a perfect silence in the room. John knew that the two Sherlocks had to be looking at each other. Exchanging some more of their near-psychic wordless communication. He didn’t however care to look and try to figure it out.

He honestly wasn’t sure why he felt so fed up, all of a sudden. All he knew was that he was, at such a level where he didn’t feel the need to pretend otherwise.

Only a few days before he had been marveling at how much he enjoyed having one Sherlock around. Had doubling the burden made it tip the scales into being a cause for aggravation?

Finally, Amalthea went, “You go on ahead. Start your interrogation. You know more about this case than I do, anyway,” she offered.

There was a grunt from Sherlock – he was probably hoisting his victim over one shoulder. Ready to carry him off into the bedroom. “If I need any assistance, I’ll call for you.”

John dropped his hands to see Amalthea nodding. Sherlock went, kicking the door shut behind him.

Once he was gone, the two that remained simply stood there in his wake, staring at one another.

“Is something wrong?” Amalthea finally asked John – in that flat, distantly confused manner that was so very _Sherlock._ At that precise moment it was more than a little infuriating.

No, that was part of the problem, John supposed. Because he didn’t actually feel as though he had been supplanted. How could he? Both Sherlocks were Sherlock. They both had the perspective that they had been there all along. The only thing that was adding anything new to the equation was Amalthea’s body.

“Why should anything be wrong?” John questioned in return, a tad shortly. “You’re just doing your usual thing, aren’t you?”

“It’s just that you sound as if you might be upset,” she noted, terse, face scrunched up as she visibly examined him.

John shook his head, forcing a disagreeing look. “I’ve no reason to be upset.”

“Well no, of course not, but reason hardly has anything to do with it,” she returned, dismissive. “You’re not angry, are you? With him?”

“No.”

“With me?”

“ _No_ ,” John replied, hotly. He didn’t particularly like having his motivations prodded at when he was only figuring them out for himself. “Look, could we just drop it. Please.”

Amalthea’s eyebrows went up. “You _are_ angry with me. What did I do?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” John said stiffly. He was trying as hard as he could to retreat from this conversation without physically going anywhere.

“You could at least give me a hint,” she pressed.

“Maybe I don’t know, myself.”

“Rubbish. Why, John? Why are you angry? Just tell me.”

“Because you almost went and bloody got yourself _killed_ , that’s why!” John fairly exploded.

Amalthea froze. She stared at him, expression surprisingly open and dismayed. John stared back at her, breathing almost hard as he had the night before.

In the silence they could make out the occasional ‘whump’ from the other room, where Sherlock and the captive man were. John didn’t bother to think about what that meant.

“That’s it, then,” John said slowly, trying not to sound like he was just figuring it out for himself. Which he was. “That’s what’s bothering me.”

“I don’t understand,” Amalthea admitted softly. It was hardly a rare thing to hear from Sherlock when it came to emotions, but this time she sounded fairly apologetic. John breathed in.

“It’s not a very _safe_ life we lead together,” he observed, laconic. “It never has been. I’ve been scared for my life more than a few times…and I’ve been scared for Sherlock’s – for yours – for a few more.” He paused. “But only one of us has died.”

“John. I didn’t really-”

“No. No, you wait, and you let me finish,” he cut her off, merciless.

It occurred to him that he was letting things loose that he’d never been moved to with the first Sherlock – the one that’d come back. He couldn’t decide whether or not it was unfair.

“I watched you jump off of a rooftop, right in front of me. I listened to you on the phone, and you made me think that…” He stopped abruptly, unable to finish that particular remark.

She didn’t take advantage of his break to try and interrupt him. She only stood there and watched his face, and listened.

“I stood over your grave, and I mourned you,” John went on. “For months. I thought you were dead, and – and it doesn’t really matter whether you were or not, in the end, you see?” he said with emotional intensity, feeling momentarily desperate. “Because I still _felt_ like you were. I went through all that. And I try not to blame you, and I think, even if I wanted to, we’re past all that now.”

He halted again, briefly, trying to steady himself. At last he let the closest thing he could to an explanation slip from his lips.

“But you have _no_ idea – couldn’t possibly, ever understand – what it does to me, after all that, thinking that you might die again.”

He waited for Amalthea to say something. Certain that this time she would. But she didn’t.

Her throat moved, swallowing. Her eyes stayed on his, unblinking.

John shook his head, slow. “When I heard that gun go off-”

“I,” Amalthea interrupted him, abruptly, and then wavered in the startled silence from him that that earned. “I was acutely aware of the possibility that you might think I was…expendable.”

It took him a beat to even grasp what she was saying: because there were two of them, because she was the second one, the one that wasn’t “real”.

John almost laughed. “Oh, oh no,” he assured her. “I know we’ve all been a little worried about me ‘getting’ it, but believe me. Apparently I do.” He gave a tiny, tight shrug. “You’re both Sherlock. You’re both just as important to me as the other.”

It was true. He wasn’t sure how it was even possible but there in his reaction to when he’d feared Amalthea was shot, that was the proof. They might be exactly the same but they were both, separately, his friend.

He cared about the both of them, with equal value.

A smile spread widely across Amalthea’s face. “I’m sorry that I frightened you.”

John did laugh that time. “No you’re not. But it’s alright. The fact that you said it anyway is touching, really.”

“I do try, you know,” she told him. There was something anxious about her tone – and John understood what she meant by ‘try’. “It isn’t easy for me. But I do try. Especially for you.”

He smiled back at her, gentle and warm. “Yeah, I know,” he promised.

They stood there smiling at one another, and everything felt much better, and they had both forgotten there was anyone else in the flat or that there was anything else in the world. And John stepped forward and moved in, reaching for her.

What he meant to do – what he would’ve sworn he was _going_ to do, right up to the very moment – was give her a pat on the shoulder, the kind of friendly if uncommon gesture he’d done to Sherlock many times before.

Instead what John suddenly found happening, was that he was pressing his lips to Amalthea’s and giving her a kiss.

It lasted exactly long enough for him to close his eyes and start to enjoy it before reality hit home.

John sprung back, feeling simultaneously like he’d been struck by lightning, and as if there was some sort of a cave-in occurring inside his stomach.

Amalthea was gazing at him, eyes wide, baffled.

“What was that?” she demanded of him, slow.

“…Oh _god_ ,” John practically howled. “I – I am so sorry, I don’t know what I – I didn’t mean-”

He took a step back, and then another. His hand flew up and pressed itself over his mouth. What was he doing? What he was he thinking?

He wasn’t; he _wasn’t_ thinking. Clearly. In fact, he _couldn’t_ think. He couldn’t breathe. He felt unaccountably hot.

He needed to get out of there.

“Oh god,” he repeated, gaping at her. “I need to – I’m sorry! Goodbye!”

And with that stammered, frenetic excuse for a farewell he fumbled his way on over to the wall, grabbed his jacket, and all but threw himself out the door of the flat.

Fleeing, getting himself away from both Sherlock Holmes – one of whom he had kissed.


End file.
